The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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")
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.
Sometimes this happens. See: Facebook y Google.
People that seem to think this never seem to consider a simple explanation: Perhaps they just haven't met very smart people yet.
(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))
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
At that point, the less greedy the mark, the more they lose.
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.
Because .. he already had a job? A whole lot of crime is committed for reasons other than financial.
------
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.
------
[1] http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...
http://www.roberttwigger.com/journal/2010/9/16/richard-feynm...
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.
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.
Perhaps this startup was doing the same thing but just outsourced the work?
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CowboyCoder http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CowboyCoding
Won't say much more than that but it's cool to see it on the front page of HN.
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.
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.
Better to be honest and call the police on yourself so-to-speak, or at least destroy the drugs before you leave the bag.
pay attention to reality how it is, not how you wish it was. i.e. don't believe models are chasing 60 yr old physics professors.
EDIT: Here's a mention at The Economist: http://www.economist.com/node/21557726
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!
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.
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.
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.
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"
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??
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
http://www.annarbor.com/news/ann-arbor-familys-custody-ordea...
The character sure gets around even though he can't process most of what's happening between normal people.
And a great read on his history on wikipedia.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Frampton
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)
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.
No way it can fail -- it's science!
When describing drug cartels, "cartel" means "mafia"
When describing the oil cartel, "cartel" means "monopolistic syndicate"
There is no comparison between OPEC and Los Zetas.
You shouldn't have even brought OPEC into this.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/secret-pape...
Bribery, corruption and human rights abuses. How is this not Los Zetas style?
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2011-05-02-atf-ci... http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/27/cigarette-smuggl...
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)
Yes. The groups trafficking in bootleg (untaxed) cigarettes are quite violent.
If you're talking about public perception in England, I'm sure you're right. But the case was here in Argentina.
It's hard to see the bias here.