This is a terrific story. Not terrific for any parties involved, but a well-written and well-told _story_. For any of you that just skimmed it - it's worth going back and reading the whole thing.
With lots of journalism these days it's terribly easy to give up on the storytelling part and stick to dry facts. Sometimes the case calls for that, but other times the weaving of the tale can be the best part.
Here, the reader is brought along for the ride - we're led to believe one version, then learn some dramatic differences that arose during the trial. Fun and worthwhile.
Or http://thefeature.net. - formerly Givemesomethingtoread.
This is Marco's, or is associated with him somehow. It has great stories, and they tend to be the right length for the evening situation where lights are out, but I want to read before I sleep.
Oddly enough it reminds me of the better articles in Vanity Fair. Sadly, they're still mostly offline, but their less fluffy serious and political pieces are well worth it.
Retelling a tired, old, heard a million times plot requires superlative writing or at least something knew to be entertaining. (or I guess bad memory on reader's part).
Yeah, I felt the same. I can appreciate good writing, but from the first paragraph this screamed to me a story about how someone actually fell for one of those scams. Maybe I should be happy that it's so rare that people fall for them that it's noteworthy when someone does.
I think the unique thing about this story is that we don't know for sure that he "fell" for it...or, at least we don't know what he fell for, exactly.
There's the simplest explanation: that he, like the archetypical older, single, naive man he seems to be, fell for an online scam.
But most online scams don't end up with people in a foreign prison. The prosecutors argued successfully that he knew what he was doing, and the texts shown as evidence seem to indicate that he knew something.
But how much was that something? Did he go through the scheme because he believed his online lover was real and that this was just a task to prove his worth to her (and get them some money)? Or did he know everything? That is, he needed money and he figured that, unlike all those other dumb drug mules, he could use his history of seeming like an aloof nerd and make the case that he "accidentally" smuggled drugs across the border.
Layered on top of this is that we're reading this after he's been sentenced. He of course doesn't want to say anything revealing until he's out of jail, but he's retelling this crazy story even after it's failed in court. Which seems to indicate that he actually was bamboozled...and yet, what about those text messages? What about all those days in the airport, waiting for the e-ticket to Brussels that arrived too late? He never once was curious what was in the bag? Even the idiots in Dumb and Dumber looked in the bag.
This story is fascinating because I'm sure anyone who knows the professor even on a casual basis could spend hours at the dinner table trying to untwist the WTFs. It's a particularly great story because there are so many loose ends, but they are ends that are loose for very understandable reasons.
I thought the article said he did look in the bag, it was empty and he filled it with laundry? Presumably it was in the lining, handle, etc. But I was thinking the same as you about the rest, hard to know what to believe.
I was wary of the elderly on-line scam defence tactic. He spent a significant time on the internet and was familiar with electronic communications. And it took me only a few seconds to find out that lived in L.A. at the time of the scam. That was less than basic due diligence.
His "greatest dream" was to win a Nobel by factually verifying "through experimentation" an amazing prediction. Any great scientist must balance the odds of failure against the price of failure and he seems to have forgotten basic methods during that step in this particular experiment.
Is that what the story suggests? My impression was that it concludes that the prof probably knew he was smuggling drugs, but was still doing it for his love interest?
If you didn't learn from an experience, chances are high the blame lies with you and not the experience.
Here are some things you can easily learn from this article…
"Smart" people are easily duped.
Things which seem obvious at first are often less obvious -- did you originally assume he was innocent, a bumbling professor? What about after the texts? Did you believe he was innocent then? Did you WANT to?
What is it that kept you reading the whole story? Something the author did? A technique you could use yourself?
Etc etc etc etc. If you expect "learnings" to present themselves to you on a plate, labeled "Learnings," pre-selected and pre-digested for you, you will never become as wise as you could.
Agreed! Amazingly the "twist" doesn't appear until after around 4300 words -- which were themselves captivating even without yet encountering the twist!
This was definitely well-written, and very enjoyable to read. But I don't think it was true journalism. The story was manipulated to show first one side, then the other, then to leave the reader hanging in the balance. I can appreciate the writing skill to do that, but I'm still left wondering whether some information was sacrificed to achieve it.
HN commenters have come up with some probable scenarios (my favorite is that he knew there were drugs but really thought Denise was real [1]), and I would think a more journalistic piece would explore those. Obviously, the writer can't put in all the details from months of research, but can give scenarios that seem plausible given those details.
Finally, I'm surprised there was no research into who the con men were. Maybe it's dangerous to investigate that, but it still seems like a totally one-sided story if he was conned, but nobody is trying to figure out who did it. So in the end, I think the entertainment value was higher than the news value or even the investigative reporting value.
>> The story was manipulated to show first one side, then the other, then to leave the reader hanging in the balance.
This is true, but this is always true. The idea of pure journalism, imo, of a story presented without artifice or bias, is an illusion. A dry style with a linear presentation of facts shorn of judgement and opinion is itself an artifice. It just happens to be an artifice that has, by cultural convention, branded itself as "true" and "objective."
I don't think recasting this story in such a style would have provided much new information or left me with a clearer picture of what had actually happened. But I think quite a bit would be lost.
I'm also amazed by the work done by the journalist into this article over a quite long period of time, the interviews, the fact-checking, ... It's a bit sad that content on most blogs or even respected papers is written several orders of magnitudes faster.
Personality is a vector. Just because you are really high up on technical smarts means nothing in regard to the rest of you. We could simplify it down to a minimal [technical-smarts world] vector where at an extreme end you could have [100 0] being "brilliant, but forgot to wear pants to work today" to [0 100] being "the friendliest, most amazing person you'll ever meet, but they can't work a toaster." Few people are a Feynman. Most of us manage to be midline boring enough we wouldn't make interesting NYT articles.
But, more interestingly, never underestimate the ability of a smart person to seem dumber than they are for their own benefit. We honestly can't tell if he's a rube, a conman, or a mark.
Having read the whole story, I can't help but think that he knew he was transporting drugs, but was duped into thinking he was doing it for the real Milani. Like all the best movie cons, you make the mark believe they're on the inside, but they're really not.
Getting back to the egotism: This is speculation, but I think his thought process on the drug smuggling probably went like this: "I'm so much smarter than everyone else I've ever met, of COURSE I will get away with it, especially with my airtight excuse if I am caught." This kind of reminds me of Hans Reiser, whose egotism and belief in his own superiority was also his downfall.
This is the origin of "you can't con an honest man." I was a victim of a very weird kind of con once, and I'm not ashamed to admit that my ego played a huge role in getting me to fall for it. Con men play to the mark's ego because because it works!
(Luckily in my case I escaped with little loss, and didn't end up in an Argentine jail.)
Unfortunately it's not true. There are a number of cons that apply towards people wanting to do the right thing (and usually mixing a bit of greed in as well), to make the pull twice as hard to resist.
Check out the Glim-dropper scam[1]. I've heard it described in multiple variations (diamond ring at a gas station, wallet on the street, etc). Importantly, the mark is both making money, and providing help to someone who needs it.
In the Glim scam, the target wants to get money he doesn't earn (neither by honest work nor by actually finding the supposed lost item) and profit by concealing information that is not supposed to be concealed (i.e. the contact info of the supposed one-eyed man). If he acted honestly, he'd say "oh, lucky you, you're getting a grand, here's the phone number!" and his loss would be $0.
The Glim-dropper scam involves the mark trying make money by inserting oneself as an intermediary who provides no benefit, concealing his true intentions. Outside of HN, that is considered dishonesty.
I don't think it's quite as simple as that, and that you're ignoring all the possible ways it could play out. I saw it explained and performed once on a program where it was a lost wallet of some sort, and if/when the mark did not offer to insert themselves into the transaction, the person who "found" that wallet would explain that they needed to be somewhere soon, but aren't greedy, and would happily split the reward so they don't miss their meeting.
In this case, the mark is helping not only the person who lost the wallet, but also the finder by allowing them to gain some reward money while not actually having to return the found item.
In this case the mark has real reasons the could expect some financial gain:
1) There is an actual task to be accomplished, they must be intermediary for this item and deliver it to the recipient.
2) The recipient may very well be believed to be unavailable for some period, and the mark may feel that the financial loss constitutes during this period is non-zero.
3) There's risk involved, as they must put out some of teir own money for the transaction to take place, even if there is expected return. There will likely be a risk/reward ratio that makes sense internally.
To me that very clearly makes it possibe that the mark is honest and non-greedy and will get taken by the con.
Indeed, the more honest and generous the mark is, the more money the con makes.
But in this scenario, an honest person would tell the finder about the reward and give him the contact info. It only works if the shopkeeper gets greedy and keeps the reward a secret.
And then the finder miraculously has to be somewhere soon, or is traveling on their way somewhere else, and would happily give up a portion of the reward if they could just be allowed to leave...
At that point, the less greedy the mark, the more they lose.
You're right. The "fake donation" scam is one example. As is the "long lost grandkid, who needs to pay his medical bills". But ... most scams do prey on greed - people assume that it's something illegal, but that it's not themselves getting ripped off by it.
Seems unlikely, unless very smart people spend their time in nonobvious places.
(FWIW I went to quite possibly the best university in the world, and while my jobs since then have all been programming I've seen a wide variety of industries - and in one case, dealt with clients from many more. Apart from anything else, sheer sample size suggests I should've met at least a few of the very smart people by now. (That said I have met at least four people who were definitely smarter than me, and several more who might have been, which possibly doesn't put me in the category you're describing))
Examples: The idea of there being an isolatable thing called "smart," and moreover that you could assess it (in relation to your own, even), and that it would admit a total ordering even if you could. Also, the idea that there might be a "best university in the world" -- across students and areas of study.
This is a thing that I have observed people with limited life experience do. Like myself, some years ago.
To borrow from a US Supreme Court Justice's famous phrase regarding obscenity, I know smart when I see it.
I too went to a reputedly top tier universtity (because I didn't want to go college and applied only there, but my father had the last laugh when I was accepted) and there were plenty of students born rich with the best educations from pre-school on, but there were also plenty who qualified on merit; that is, they proved to be especially smart/successful in some field or generally/measurably smart enough to meet admissions standards.
But I found the same old curve fell into place: some folks could cut it, some couldn't.
But here's how I came to measure 'smart' as in WICKED smart: the guy who majored in physics, published short stories in national magazines, taught himself guitar for kicks while getting stoned, learned Italian in a month to qualify for a semester abroad, could dunk a basketball and play a pretty fair game of tennis, was at once personable but didn't suffer fools, yet still wanted to do more. (Not to offend, but after geting through machine language he confessed that computer courses seemed to be 'technical training' and something he could pick up later if need be.)
Oh, and he got laid. A lot.
So, while numerous comments here have objected to the subjective, narrow idea of smartness, I must disagree that it is only in the eye beholder, and only a self-comparison.
The world is a big place. Your admission that you have met people smarter than yourself may well put you in a different category.
The people I talk of are the people that seem to honestly think they are the smartest people in the world/their industry. Unless they have occasion to interact with people on the level of Nobel laureates routinely, I suspect their sample may not include 'very smart people' (and I don't mean 'very smart', I mean VERY smart, i.e. I am not saying the people they have met have been dull, just that they may not be in the upper echelons of intelligence).
Also, people's self-ranking of their own traits (especially something that is somewhat ill-defined, like intelligence) is notoriously less than objective.
Just know that for some of the people you have met and consider yourself clearly smarter than, they may have the the opposite view and believe it just as assuredly as you.
I think you don't really know what you're talking about. Sample size? What about sample quality?
People are generally - very generally - good at what they enjoy doing, because it sets up a virtuous circle: they do it because they enjoy it, and they enjoy the feeling of competence from it. And after having achieved this competence, they can start to tell whether other people might be better at it than them.
The mistake is to egotistically think that what ever "it" is, is the only metric that matters. There are lots of "its", and while there is usually some correlation, more than one dimension is needed to explain the hidden model.
The "smartest" person in the world might be a baker or mechanic or farmer. They may be smart enough to see that analytical prowess on its own isn't particularly impressive, especially when combined with social deficits; that the best one can hope for, in the end, is that the work of one's life is its own reward.
So much of "smarts" is just used for peacocking, jockeying for social status, in whatever pyramid we've embedded ourselves into. And we can hardly help it; we're genetically programmed to do it. Some are more aware of the trap we're in than others; but we all play along to some degree, because the penalties for refusing to play are severe. I suspect the smartest people are those who've found a way out of the trap, the hedonic treadmill, without being kicked out of the game.
I'm not the smartest person I know, but I used to think that you could be. Nobody is, for it's a heterogenous cloud of expertises. I spent a lot of time studying, mostly at Oxford and USC ie smart places, and my impression is that hardly any of my colleagues were a patch in overall brightness on many of those whom I have met in the past few years in the Bay Area. However, criteria for smarts are also exceedingly heterogeneous, and you need to have breadth, experience and wisdom to see those smarts. And acknowledge your own weaknesses that you can work on them to be a more sophistimacated [sic] human. I now know so many more smart people than I did, but it may be that I've a. trained myself in humility and b. actually found smart people so I can learn from them, and thus provide more value myself from my strengths. This then underlines my argument as it means I probably did underestimate some of my Oxford compadres in my youth.
So, beware those claiming to be smart. Mostly, as most who've encountered Wolfram, Kurzweil and their ilk know, have a big chunk of smarts missing. empathetic and listening skills, huge in other kinds of pattern matching, which we haven't been able to code yet. I have a recent acquaintance who's like that too. Brilliant coder, engineer and hosts a History Channel TV show on inventions, but his ego is so set on his and his friends' brilliance that he misses the point.
Focusing on the processing and analytic skills is a blindness to the other equally important parts of a well-adapted and responsive psyche. That you have amazing memory, analytic and processing skills is truly wonderful, but A. it's not a moral plus, it's just a rare thing you have, like skills at piano or football, whcih can be trained, but mostly inherited too and B. if you rely on that alone you're neglecting a lot of other stuff.
Sheer sample size is relevant if people were distributed randomly. This is obviously not the case - people have a lot of choice as to people they meet, encounters they participate in, etc. and smart people probably have even more choice since if they didn't want to meet somebody - say, for some reason, they'd hate to meet students eager to meet smart people - they would easily find a way out of it, being smart. So your encounters or lack of those with them are not random and sample size does not matter that much.
I agree. When we got to the sms records part I was getting ready for the corruption angle wondering whether they were fabricated. However, there was absolutely no indication that the he even questioned their authenticity... instead he goes on to make some incredulous story to explain them... Clearly he thinks he's much smarter than anyone else in the room.
Do you really think a personality vector (space) basis is close to two-dimensional, or was that a drastically simplified example? I don't think [IQ EQ] comes close to accurately describing personality.
Plenty of people who have poor inter-personal skills and "emotional intelligence" would still not be caught dead transporting someone else's luggage in that situation.
Oh, not at all. I didn't want to clutter things with a detailed dozen to hundred dimensional example.
A good intro to various (small, 7 to 10 dimensional) standard bases of personality descriptors is Making Sense of People: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0050JKCI6
Plus, some of the attributes depend on the person observing. People have widely varying likability based on who they are around. (e.g. "knows how to comfort me when I'm sad" or "quality of goodnight hug" or "their voice makes me want to tape their mouth shut and throw them in an active volcano")
Actually, Feynman might not be the best scientist role model to hold up for all-around common sense and decent behavior, particularly where relationships with women are concerned.
He's a great counter-example to stereotype of the absent-minded or socially awkward genius. He was the rare combination of genius level scientist with powerful personal charisma.
It's a bit complicated. From a talk by Danny Hillis [1]:
------
The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.
Oh yes! One of the anecdotes I remember from James Gleick’s _Genius_ was that one of Feynman’s ex-girlfriends kidnapped some memento of his nobel prize to get him to apologize (sorry, a bit hazy on the details, it’s been more than 15 years since I read that).
He was getting paid well as a professor with an endowed chair at a major research university. He has no motive to smuggle drugs. He was the victim here.
There's some aspect of his personal finances that's been glossed over here... it's pretty clear that despite decades of income he didn't have much in the way of assets to use to pay for his defense. (One would think you'd sell anything you own if it means avoiding a prolonged stay in a South American jail.) Maybe it was the divorce, or something else, but he doesn't seem to have a great financial situation.
Another possibility is that he was looking for some FU money? He felt very highly of himself, perhaps he felt he was being held back and wanted a bit more freedom. Pure speculation of course.
Definitely possible. I was just replying to the suggestion that he had "no motive" to smuggle drugs. $400K (and tax-free) is a lot of motive, even if you have substantial savings. Martha Stewart was worth millions and ended up in jail over what, $250K?
That's like saying millionaire could not possibly commit fraud - he already has a million! Madoff's case provides ample proof to the contrary, to say nothing of other people operating the finance industry.
The story raises an interesting dilemma that many of us in the tech and academic realm are faced with quite often, when recruiting / hiring people to join our teams (whether at a company or in a lab or in an academic dept). Personality and indeed intelligence is a vector. How much of a priority do you put on the length of the projection of the vector onto the dimension(s) that are of direct relevance (e.g. expertise and creativity in theoretical physics) and how much weight do you put on the other dimensions (of which there are many)?
The risk of hiring a mad/strange/unstable/unusual "genius" is that dealing with the social aspects of their presence is not without its cost, even if there is a high probability they can generate the magic sauce. The risk of hiring a more well rounded set of team members is that you will end up with a pod of best friends who never end up generating the magic sauce.
Personally I favour the latter approach, I strongly believe that a more cohesive, well rounded team ends up being greater than the sum of the parts, and that quite often, a team containing a mad genius devolves into chaos.
A private investigator I know was asked by a startup to look into the background of a prospective engineer. She found what she thought were some personal red flags, including a lot of online forum unpleasant rants, and some financial ones, including a previous bankruptcy filing. They hired him anyway because he seemed like a really good engineer. It didn't work out (one problem was that he apparently wasn't a very good engineer) and they let him go, and now he's threatening to blackmail/extort them.
I think businesses and engineering teams would be wise to consider sociability a big factor in choosing talent. But I think in academia, that's less of a concern if the scientist can show that he/she can publish papers and create monetizable research.
I worked for a large pharmaceutical firm that had a whole department involved with just doing background checks on their prospective scientists. Diploma fraud could be a big problem for them.
Perhaps this startup was doing the same thing but just outsourced the work?
No...she is friends with one of the startup founders. She wasn't hired, but did it as a favor. And the investigating was limited to electronic records...not the garbage-snooping, surveillance-from-car type :)
I would have to agree with the later approach as well. I have some limited experience hiring and I would say that I've learned some valuable lessons. One is that the "other dimensions" you list, which I assume are things like ability to work in a team, humility, dedication, work ethic, etc., are far more important than "smarts". To go along with that, having a ton of "smarts" does not compensate for a lack of the other dimensions. I'd say it can in some cases even go the other route and make things worse as a "smart" but non-team player is capable of doing more damage than a less intelligent non-team player.
I feel that the only relevant factor in hiring should be competence. How do you define being well rounded, and how do you measure that when you're interviewing? Is that just a code word for being someone like you?
you can be a competent solo developer and still leave a team strictly worse off with you than without. i've seen it happen - people who subtract so much by the sum of their bad interactions with people that it outweighs any value their work adds.
I guess it depends on how outstanding your stuff must be. If it is ok to be merely very good, then the later approach should be the best, I think. If you want one of a kind stuff, then you might want to be a little bit more lax about the other aspects. But often there isn't a conflict. I've found that the brightest people are often very nice, too.
Their use of a somewhat-known bikini model sounds like the same technique phishers use to weed out their victims: introducing typos/stories that non-gullible people would easily see as discrediting the entire ploy. If anyone continues from that point on, they've already proven that they're susceptible to being scammed, and the job is that much easier.
Good point. Craigslist is a hotbed of spammers and phishers, especially in the housing section. They employ some pretty transparent tactics: amenities that are too good to be true at the given price point, pictures that you can easily reverse search, etc. They're looking for people who won't ask too many questions.
I wonder what the best course of action would be in such a situation?
Ditch the suitcase and risk the attention of some fairly unpleasant people?
Go to the police and risk being arrested anyway?
There was a TV series a while ago called "Banged up abroad" which documented a number of cases like this.
It was quite scary the lengths some of the criminals had gone to in order to find drug mules, in one case they had got an attractive woman to date a guy for a year and gain his trust before getting him to mule for them.
They picked a 60yr old dude because he was likely to fall for the scam. It's like the Nigerian 419 dudes -- their letters are barely literate because they're designed to snare only those most likely to fall for the later, lucrative stages of the scam. Any time spent making their appeals more realistic would only mean time wasted on people with functional bullshit filters. There was an interesting paper from a guy at Microsoft? I think? about this. I'll see if I can turn it up.
The people who would fall for that story are the exact people they are targeting. They don't need everyone to believe them--just the one gullible mark.
I wondered the same thing. Best I could think of would be to hide the case somewhere secure and go to your embassy to seek advice.
On the whole, though, if you're sitting in a hotel room thousands of miles from home with a case full of drugs then your situation is unlikely to improve whatever you do.
Once I discovered the suitcase was empty, I would have left it open on my hotel bed, and then I would leave the hotel, fly home, and then call the local police as soon as I was out of their country.
Assuming somehow I got to that stage, that's the point I would realize there is very good chance I will be killed or kidnapped if I don't do what the people that are observing me expect. I would try to conceive a plan to leave with the empty suit case from the hotel but ditch it shortly before boarding a flight to US. Still at that point I would fear retribution later in US and because of that I might decide that the best course of action is to go along sadly.
Yes, because your claim you thought it was just a dumb empty suitcase will be very believable. You forgot it because (A) it was not your bag and (B) it was not valuable, so it was easy to forget.
You could go to a police station and ask for assistance searching the bag. You could go early to the airport and ask for the help of a drug sniffing dog.
Assuming you are innocent, what will absolutely doom your defense is any indication that you knew you were doing something not quite right and took any effort to not get caught. "Well, just in case, I will do this so it is more likely I get away with it."
Complying with the wishes of imagined unpleasant people you have never met implies you are probably doing something wrong on purpose, doesn't it? If that is your concern, immediately book a flight to your home country, pronto!
I'd be paranoid that I was being watched by drug dealers who would try and intercept me on the way to the police station. Or more likely that the local cops were paid off. Not sure how much I'd trust the justice system there to get to the truth either.
If you act in compliance with the wishes of criminals, as if they were holding a gun to your head, without them even lifting a finger, you are rewarding them greatly to your detriment.
If fear you are being watched is going to color your thinking, rightly or wrongly, then you must get assistance immediately. There is no way to out think imagined foes without someone with clout to watch your back.
Even if the local police are worthless, the fact that you went to local law enforcement for assistance will probably be possible to establish at trial.
The reason willing mules are punished harshly is because they know they have something worth stealing, so when the package goes "missing" there is an obvious guess as to why. If you cannot keep your willing mules under control, you are instantly doomed as a criminal.
Stupid ignorant mules can only be expected to act stupid and ignorant. I find it unlikely anyone would bother to punish them for being slightly less stupid than originally expected -- but I suppose anything is possible. The criminals would be spending resources to harm someone already under law enforcement scrutiny; sounds like an unnecessary risk for no positive gain.
Don't ever do it "on your own". Don't ever contact local police.
Contact your embassy / consulate, explain everything truthfully and your suspicions. You may or may not be charged (you've already been an idiot and deserve whatever you get). But at least, you'll (probably) be getting if from your own justice system which will be better for most citizens of most countries.
Most citizens of most countries, yes, but in this case he seems to have been a US citizen. While there are many wonderful things about the US, mercy for drug smugglers is not among them, particularly compared to Argentina or Ecuador.
Assuming the cops won't be sympathetic and there's no cameras in the men's room, dump the contents in the furthest stall you can find, without touching any of it. Then get the hell out of there on the first flight back you can get or head to the embassy.
What would be the incentive for killing the guy, though? Since nobody knows who the criminals are, sending a message "don't mess with - uh, nevermind" isn't very useful?
True, though violent criminals aren't always known for being driven by pure rationality and avoiding emotional outbursts, and drug trade is probably run by such criminals.
His greatest dream was "to have a prediction verified by experimentation." This, he explained, was how you win the Nobel as a theoretical particle physicist. "That would bring an enormous sense of fulfillment, quite apart from the Nobel Prize"
It's hard to tell from that statement if he puts more importance on the scientific achievement itself, or the Nobel prize awarded for the achievement.
You hit the nail on the head of the irony implicit in the hunt for the inherently material/prestige-granting awards in science where we're also meant to believe these individuals care only about a higher, non-trivial realm. Funny
"That would bring an enormous sense of fulfillment, quite apart from the Nobel Prize"
The part you are objecting to was definitely not part of the quote, it was added/paraphrased by the author, for the audience's sake.
From the wording, it seems clear that the author said something like "You could win a Nobel prize for something like that", and the professor retorted with "enormous fulfillment"
Whoa..what a story! So beautiful, well-written and expressive! Kudos to the author..felt like watching an Al Pacino film!!
One thing I'm not sure of is if he actually knew he WAS transporting drugs, yeah I do get the fact that the injunction was lifted, but was he really aware of his actions??
The 30 text messages discussing hiding from the drug goons, changing meeting locations, the value of the cocaine he's transporting, etc seem to indicate that he did in fact know. I mean I suppose as he says he could have just been kidding around, but those messages (and that many) don't seem like a joke. Of course only an idiot would send texts about their drug smuggling plans, but then again there is ample evidence in this article this guy was in fact an idiot in many respects.
I think that's part of the charm of the story. There's really no definitive answer to your questions and it's up to the reader to arrive at his own conclusions
- if anybody hasn't heard of death sentences for traffickers in Asia, or had the experience in the airport, when you're waiting to clear Customs/Immigration, of seeing the labrador retriever decide that somebody's bags were interesting, you can google those stories.
- my parents are/were academics and I've met a nontrivial number of people who are brilliant in their little corner of math, software, EE, physics but palpably short on the skills needed to not get hit by a car or not burn down their kitchen.
Slightly off topic, but as someone who hopes to sail around the world one day, I can't wait for 3D drug printing to arrive. Boats are often left unattended and with every other cruiser announcing their planned route on a blog, I am amazed so few get in troubles for unknowingly transporting drugs planted by some drug smugglers. Maybe it's the lack of speed that makes them unattractive.
Some of the narco-sub stuff in incredibly impressive given the constraints they're working under. They might spend ~$5M on a single-use vessel, knowing it's going to be maybe 1-2% of the total value of the trip, and the risk of re-use is too great.
I'm curious how UUV (unmanned/autonomous underwater vehicle) tech might change the economics of that; certainly you could improve on the eggs/basket metric if you could bring the cost/size/detectability down.
For your cruising theory; I wonder just how hard it would be to build a magnetic/quickset-epoxy limpet-mine type construction that can hold a few 10's of Kg of payload.
Bonus points for ruggedised GPS+satphone so you can track it, and perhaps even instruct it to detach and inflate buoyancy compensator 10-20m underwater til you come collect.
My boat's hull is fiberglass, but the keel is pig iron and now I'm picturing leaving some Mexican port (let's say headed for San Diego) and having one of your magnetic mines attach as I turn north, then drop off somewhere near the SD harbor.
I'm guessing you could more easily target cargo ships since you know (or can find out where they're headed) and you also know they'll use marked channels. There's no reason the buoyancy compensator couldn't be used to park the shipment until a ship headed the right direction passed over it.
This was done in Australia and they were caught. 90% of drug seizures are a result of intelligence gathering rather than search.
I listened to a talk from the former head of a customs agency who admitted that search alone is useless in stopping the flow of contraband. He described it as searching for a needle in a haystack in a haystack.
The intelligence turns out to be a good method. It is difficult to import multiple kilograms of a drug into a major city and not make noise about it. First you have the concern of anybody in the lower end of the pyramid being caught, and second there is the competition who are usually more than happy to rat you out to get rid of you.
I'm willing to bet that even the case of the professor in OP was a result of intelligence. There are two common ways couriers are caught in South America:
* the first is that they are turned in by the organization that has sent them. As part of police corruption and keeping locals out of prisons they setup foreigners.
* the second is signature detection. It turns out that a lot of organizations use the same types of suitcases. I bet it was the type of suitcase he was carrying that prompted them to search.
I have no doubts the drug lords can up with plety of 'innovations' if they wanted to start abusing sailboat cruisers on a large scale. Short of ending the insane war on drugs the best thing to hope for is other tech being more economical (UUV as you mention) or disruptive of the entire system (3D printing of drugs).
I think that the reason we do not hear much about such things is either:
1- The 'drug mine' is wildly successful and has not been caught by the authorities yet
or
2- People intelligent enough to be building such devices found less risky and more profitable avenues for their skills. i.e.: criminals are not smart and that's why they are criminals.
I think there's also possibility (3) - the cost or effort of a "drug mine" is higher than existing methods, which work relatively well.
I mean, drugs are clearly getting into the US, and proper organizational structure in your criminal enterprise means that mules and runners getting pinched every once in a while is just a cost of doing business.
I may be prejudiced, but I think that criminals (that get caught) are stupid only in 1st world. If you go to poor countries such as Bolivia, or even Mexico, you'll find that the criminal cartels employ some very, very smart people with ingenuity.
Along those lines, a prof at UMich lost custody of his son because he gave him Mikes Hard Lemonade at a baseball game. So much brilliance and cluelessness wrapped up into one person.
It appears that not only did he know there were drugs, but he was planning on stealing them for his and Milani's benefit. It seems he had a plan to outsmart everyone.
The first impression I get from this picture is that it looks photoshopped. A closer inspection reveals that it's not the picture that is shopped, but the model.
Reading this story made me wonder, does it ever work? And if so, I wonder what the success ratio is. Clearly is must be high enough (or profitable enough despite losses) for them to keep doing it...
I'm not a doctor, but from this article it seems to me like the professor has Asperger's or another ASD. The way he fixates on data, attempts to quantify qualitative things like ego, and one sided verbosity expressed in the article seem similar to behaviors I've observed in people with AS. Any psychiatrists on HN today?
This may seem tangentially on-topic, but I'd really recommend faculty at universities be required to go through some basic computer (and Internet) literacy courses. Some faculty I've worked with can barely check their email, and most universities already require students to show basic computer proficiency.
"Professor Frampton reportedly told investigators that he was set up after flying to Argentina to meet a "well known model" he met over the internet. Frampton was held in Villa Devoto Jail in Buenos Aires awaiting trial amid claims that his defense would involve an argument that he suffers from "a schizoid personality disorder that prevents him from making normal social connections and renders him unusually gullible."
http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/06/06/2118053/unc-prof-accu...
How can someone that smart not ask for a verification photo where she is holding today's newspaper, or something like that. The guy is a physicist, can't he think of something like that?
The article quotes Frampton as saying, "I have been accused of having a huge ego." Asking for proof would be admitting to himself (and her) that he can't realistically bag a swimsuit model.
There's a difference between being able to buy a Rolex and believing the guy on the corner selling Rolexes out of this coat pocket sells genuine ones. First has to do with the ego, the second only with lack of the common sense.
I was going to comment on how interesting it was that such a (Possibly?)smart person could be so naive in thinking a famous model would date him but then I see so many comments saying stuff like 'I think he knew about the drugs'
Of course he did! This was the point of the story!?!
Back to smart people, I'd be interested to see a write up on his work. Was he actually any good?
And also I'll say it, he is old, has his mind degraded? Or has he gone fk it, life's not what it used to be why not go crazy (With a little mental illness thrown in)
Reading the comments here, I wonder if most people read the article all the way down to the paragraph that begins: "Frampton’s long-held defense"? I don't want to spoil it, but would highly recommend reading the entire article before forming any conclusions.
Interesting read and well written. Unless I missing something those SMSs the prof sent that appear to be referencing drugs are a huge red flag. Either he is unbelievably stupid or was in on it somehow.
It's funny, I hadn't thought considered it possible that he knew about the cocaine and he was convinced the model was real. I thought it was either-or: either he was completely blinded by his love and really is naive about transferring random bags across the border, or he was in need of money and concocted this honey-trap story (and a facade of total naivete) as a cover for being a drug mule.
I suppose it's possible that he thought being a drug mule was just one of the tasks he had to do to woo this woman. Which would be even more boneheaded than just falling for her innocently.
I suppose it's possible that he thought being a drug mule was just one of the tasks he had to do to woo this woman. Which would be even more boneheaded than just falling for her innocently.
From reading the texts he sent from the airport, and the calculations he scratched out on paper at the same time, it seems that this is actually what he was thinking.
As far as I can tell, he planned to steal the cocaine from Bolivians, fly to Europe with it, and then share the proceeds of selling the cocaine with his new bikini-model Czech wife.
"As far as I can tell, he planned to steal the cocaine from Bolivians, fly to Europe with it, and then share the proceeds of selling the cocaine with his new bikini-model Czech wife."
What sounds really strange to be in that paper is that a physicist needed to multiply 200 by 2000 on paper. How hard is that? First-grader should be able to do it.
There's a significant difference between busting people for dropping acid or growing some weed in their backyard and busting people for trafficking large amounts of cocaine on behalf of an international drug cartel.
Yet is there an international, violent, criminal cigarette mafia? No. It's the level of Canadians not declaring their cheaper shopping goods from the USA when they cross the border to avoid tax.
It's nowhere near as serious as the Mexican Narco gangs. No one is being dissolved in vats of lye for smuggled cigarettes.
But it is more serious than Joe Sixpack bringing in a few extra undeclared bottles of whisky.
Cigarettes are legal and regulated, but high tax, and it is the high tax that causes smuggling and counterfeiting.
Real cigarettes used to be exported from the UK, (thus avoiding UK duties) and then smuggled back in (again, to avoid the duty). The outward flow was stopped, but that means that counterfeiters stepped in. Now there's a more dangerous product, with less regulation, being smuggled in to the UK. Criminal gangs are involved in the production and distribution of counterfeit cigarettes. Raids on distribution find amounts in the order of ten million cigarettes. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-20297912)
Oil is different in that it is not something one produces, but rather something that one simply finds. Drugs are produced by farming or chemical processes (or some combination), and most popular drugs can be produced at very low cost.
Perhaps. It's still idiotic to take unknown suitcases with you through an airport. There are things other than drugs that are illegal or have restrictions on transporting across borders.
As an aside, I wonder how much of his sentence has to do with his British lineage, and bitterness over the Falklands War. It seems a little odd for prosecution and the authorities to display little leniency or empathy, and understanding those undertones, it gives me a bit of the us-vs.-them heebie-jeebies.
Here in Argentina, Falklands/Malvinas are the first thing people associate with Britain. A British friend of mine was trying to persuade her (Argentine) landlord to fix the roof in her apartment, and he started yelling at her about the Malvinas. The dominant stereotype of Englishpeople is not that they have terrible food or that they drink a lot of tea but that they are pirates who want to steal offshore oil that legitimately belongs to Argentina and who keep invading Argentina over and over. There is actually a suburb of Buenos Aires whose actual name is "Malvinas Argentinas".
If you're talking about public perception in England, I'm sure you're right. But the case was here in Argentina.
With lots of journalism these days it's terribly easy to give up on the storytelling part and stick to dry facts. Sometimes the case calls for that, but other times the weaving of the tale can be the best part.
Here, the reader is brought along for the ride - we're led to believe one version, then learn some dramatic differences that arose during the trial. Fun and worthwhile.