For his legions of fans, he was the Peter Pan of pop music: the little boy who refused to grow up.

Michael Jackson, Pop Icon, Is Dead at 50

Rusty Kennedy/Associated Press

Michael Jackson performed during the Super Bowl XXVII halftime show in 1993 in Pasadena, Calif. More Photos >

By BROOKS BARNES

Published: June 25, 2009
LOS ANGELES — For his legions of fans, he was the Peter Pan of pop music: the little boy who refused to grow up. But on the verge of another attempted comeback, he is suddenly gone, this time for good.

Michael Jackson, whose quintessentially American tale of celebrity and excess took him from musical boy wonder to global pop superstar to sad figure haunted by lawsuits, paparazzi and failed plastic surgery, was pronounced dead on Thursday afternoon at U.C.L.A. Medical Center after arriving in a coma, a city official said. Mr. Jackson was 50, having spent 40 of those years in the public eye he loved.

The singer was rushed to the hospital, a six-minute drive from the rented Bel-Air home in which he was living, shortly after noon by paramedics for the Los Angeles Fire Department. A hospital spokesman would not confirm reports of cardiac arrest. He was pronounced dead at 2:26 pm.

As with Elvis Presley or the Beatles, it is impossible to calculate the full effect Mr. Jackson had on the world of music. At the height of his career, he was indisputably the biggest star in the world; he has sold more than 750 million albums. Radio stations across the country reacted to his death with marathon sessions of his songs. MTV, which grew successful in part as a result of Mr. Jackson’s groundbreaking videos, reprised its early days as a music channel by showing his biggest hits.

From his days as the youngest brother in the Jackson 5 to his solo career in the 1980s and early 1990s, Mr. Jackson was responsible for a string of hits like “I Want You Back,” “I’ll Be There” “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” “Billie Jean” and “Black or White” that exploited his high voice, infectious energy and ear for irresistible hooks.

As a solo performer, Mr. Jackson ushered in the age of pop as a global product — not to mention an age of spectacle and pop culture celebrity. He became more character than singer: his sequined glove, his whitened face, his moonwalk dance move became embedded in the cultural firmament.

His entertainment career hit high-water marks with the release of “Thriller,” from 1982, which has been certified 28 times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, and with the “Victory” world tour that reunited him with his brothers in 1984.

But soon afterward, his career started a bizarre disintegration. His darkest moment undoubtedly came in 2003, when he was indicted on child molesting charges. A young cancer patient claimed the singer had befriended him and then groped him at his Neverland estate near Santa Barbara, Calif., but Mr. Jackson was acquitted on all charges.

Reaction to his death started trickling in from the entertainment community late Thursday.

“I am absolutely devastated at this tragic and unexpected news,” the music producer Quincy Jones said in a statement. “I’ve lost my little brother today, and part of my soul has gone with him.”

Berry Gordy, the Motown founder who helped develop the Jackson 5, told CNN that Mr. Jackson, as a boy, “always wanted to be the best, and he was willing to work as hard as it took to be that. And we could all see that he was a winner at that age.

Tommy Mottola, a former head of Sony Music, called Mr. Jackson “the cornerstone to the entire music business.”

“He bridged the gap between rhythm and blues and pop music and made it into a global culture,” said Mr. Mottola, who worked with Mr. Jackson until the singer cut his ties with Sony in 2001.

Impromptu vigils broke out around the world, from Portland, Ore., where fans organized a one-gloved bike ride (“glittery costumes strongly encouraged”) to Hong Kong, where fans gathered with candles and sang his songs.

In Los Angeles, hundreds of fans — some chanting Mr. Jackson’s name, some doing the “Thriller” dance — descended on the hospital and on the hillside house where he was staying.

Jeremy Vargas, 38, hoisted his wife, Erica Renaud, 38, on his shoulders and they danced and bopped to “Man in the Mirror” playing from an onlooker’s iPod connected to external speakers — the boom boxes of Mr. Jackson’s heyday long past their day.

“I am in shock and awe,” said Ms. Renaud, who was visiting from Red Hook, Brooklyn, with her family. “He was like a family member to me.”

Dreams of a Comeback

Mr. Jackson was an object of fascination for the news media since the Jackson 5’s first hit, “I Want You Back,” in 1969. His public image wavered between that of the musical naif, who wanted only to recapture his youth by riding on roller-coasters and having sleepovers with his friends, to the calculated mogul who carefully constructed his persona around his often-baffling public behavior.

Mr. Jackson had been scheduled to perform 50 concerts at the O2 arena in London beginning next month and continuing into 2010. The shows, which quickly sold out, were positioned as a comeback, with the potential to earn him up to $50 million, according to some reports.

But there had also been worry and speculation that Mr. Jackson was not physically ready for such an arduous run of concerts, and his postponement of the first of those shows to July 13 from July 8 fueled new rounds of gossip about his health. Nevertheless, he was rehearsing Wednesday night at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. “The primary reason for the concerts wasn’t so much that he was wanting to generate money as much as it was that he wanted to perform for his kids,” said J. Randy Taraborrelli, whose biography, “Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness,” was first published by Citadel in 1991. “They had never seen him perform before.”

Mr. Jackson’s brothers, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Randy, have all had performing careers, with varying success, since they stopped performing together. (Randy, the youngest, replaced Jermaine when the Jackson 5 left Motown.) His sisters, Rebbie, La Toya and Janet, are also singers, and Janet Jackson has been a major star in her own right for two decades. They all survive him, as do his parents, Joseph and Katherine Jackson, of Las Vegas, and three children: Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., Paris Michael Katherine Jackson, born to Mr. Jackson’s second wife, Deborah Jeanne Rowe, and Prince Michael Jackson II, the son of a surrogate mother. Mr. Jackson was also briefly married to Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis Presley.

A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department said the department assigned its robbery and homicide division to investigate the death, but the spokesman said that was because of Mr. Jackson’s celebrity.

“Don’t read into anything,” the spokesman told reporters gathered outside the Bel-Air house. He said the coroner had taken possession of the body and would conduct an investigation.

At a news conference at the hospital, Jermaine Jackson spoke to reporters about his brother. “It is believed he suffered cardiac arrest at his home,” he said softly. A personal physician first tried to resuscitate Michael Jackson at his home before paramedics arrived. A team of doctors then tried to resuscitate him for more than an hour, his brother said.

“May our love be with you always,” Jermaine Jackson concluded, his gaze aloft.

In Gary, Ind., hundreds of people descended upon the squat clapboard house were Mr. Jackson spent his earliest years. There were tears, loud wails, and quiet prayers as old neighbors joined hands with people who had driven in from Chicago and other nearby towns to pay their respects.

“Just continue to glorify the man, Lord,” said Ida Boyd-King, a local pastor who led the crowd in prayer. “Let’s give God praise for Michael.”

Shelletta Hinton, 40, drove to Gary from Chicago with her two young children. She said they had met Mr. Jackson in Gary a couple of years ago when he received a key to the city. “We felt like we were close to Michael,” she said. “This is a sad day.”

As dusk set in, mourners lighted candles and placed them on the concrete doorstep. Some left teddy bears and personal notes. Doris Darrington, 77, said she remembered seeing the Jackson 5 so many times around Gary that she got sick of them. But she, too, was feeling hurt by the sudden news of Mr. Jackson’s death.

“He has always been a source of pride for Gary, even though he wasn’t around much,” she said. “The older person, that’s not the Michael we knew. We knew the little bitty boy with the big Afro and the brown skin. That’s how I’ll always remember Michael.”

Michael Joseph Jackson was born in Gary on Aug. 29, 1958. The second youngest of six brothers, he began performing professionally with four of them at the age of 5 in a group that their father, Joe, a steelworker, had organized the previous year. In 1968, the group, originally called the Jackson Brothers, was signed by Motown Records. The Jackson 5 was an instant phenomenon. The group’s first four singles — “I Want You Back,” “ABC,” “The Love You Save” and “I’ll Be There” — all reached No. 1 on the pop charts in 1970, a feat no group had accomplished before. And young Michael was the center of attention: he handled virtually all the lead vocals, danced with energy and finesse, and displayed a degree of showmanship rare in a performer of any age.

In 1971, Mr. Jackson began recording under his own name, while continuing to perform with his brothers. His recording of “Ben,” the title song from a movie about a boy and his homicidal pet rat, was a No. 1 hit in 1972.

The brothers (minus Michael’s older brother Jermaine, who was married to the daughter of Berry Gordy, Motown’s founder and chief executive) left Motown in 1975 and, rechristened the Jacksons, signed to Epic, a unit of CBS Records. Three years later, Michael made his movie debut as the Scarecrow in the screen version of the hit Broadway musical “The Wiz.” But movie stardom proved not to be his destiny.

A Solo Sensation

Music stardom on an unprecedented level, however, was. Mr. Jackson’s first solo album for Epic, “Off the Wall,” released in 1979, yielded four No. 1 singles and sold seven million copies, but it was a mere prologue to what came next. His follow-up, “Thriller,” released in 1982, became the best-selling album of all time and helped usher in the music video age. The video for title track, directed by John Landis, was an elaborate horror-movie pastiche that was more of a mini-movie than a promotional clip.

Seven of the nine tracks on “Thriller” were released as singles and reached the Top 10. The album spent two years on the Billboard album chart and sold an estimated 100 million copies worldwide. It also won eight Grammy Awards.

The choreographer and director Vincent Paterson, who directed Mr. Jackson in several videos, recalled watching him rehearse a dance sequence for four hours in front of a mirror until it felt like second nature.

“That’s how he developed the moonwalk, working on it for days if not weeks until it was organic,” he said. “He took an idea that he had seen some street kids doing and perfected it.”

Mr. Jackson’s next album, “Bad,” released in 1987, sold eight million copies and produced five No. 1 singles and another state-of-the-art video, this one directed by Martin Scorsese. It was a huge hit by almost anyone else’s standards, but an inevitable letdown after “Thriller.”

It was at this point that Mr. Jackson’s bizarre private life began to overshadow his music. He would go on to release several more albums and, from time to time, to stage elaborate concert tours. And he would never be too far from the public eye. But it would never again be his music that kept him there.

Even with the millions Mr. Jackson earned, his eccentric lifestyle took a severe financial toll. In 1988 Mr. Jackson paid about $17 million for a 2,600-acre ranch in Los Olivos, Calif., 125 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Calling it Neverland after the mythical island of Peter Pan, he outfitted the property with amusement-park rides, a zoo and a 50-seat theater, at a cost of $35 million, according to reports, and the ranch became his sanctum.

But Neverland, and Mr. Jackson’s lifestyle, were expensive to maintain. A forensic accountant who testified at Mr. Jackson’s molesting trial in 2005 said Mr. Jackson’s annual budget in 1999 included $7.5 million for personal expenses and $5 million to maintain Neverland. By at least the late 1990s, he began to take out huge loans to support himself and pay debts. In 1998, he took out a loan for $140 million from Bank of America, which two years later was increased to $200 million. Further loans of hundreds of millions followed.

The collateral for the loans was Mr. Jackson’s 50 percent share in Sony/ATV Music Publishing, a portfolio of thousands of songs, including rights to 259 songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, considered some of the most valuable properties in music.

In 1985, Mr. Jackson paid $47.5 million for ATV, which included the Beatles songs — a move that estranged him from Mr. McCartney, who had advised him to invest in music rights — and 10 years later, Mr. Jackson sold 50 percent of his interest to Sony for $90 million, creating a joint venture, Sony/ATV. Estimates of the catalog’s value exceed $1 billion.

Last year, Neverland narrowly escaped foreclosure after Mr. Jackson defaulted on $24.5 million he owed on the property. A Los Angeles real estate investment company, Colony Capital L.L.C., bought the note, and put the title for the property into a joint venture with Mr. Jackson.

A Scandal’s Heavy Toll

In many ways, Mr. Jackson never recovered from the child molesting trial, a lurid affair that attracted media from around the world to watch as Mr. Jackson, wearing a different costume each day, appeared in a small courtroom in Santa Maria, Calif., to listen as a parade of witnesses spun a sometimes-incredible tale.

The case ultimately turned on the credibility of Mr. Jackson’s accuser, a 15-year-old cancer survivor who said the defendant had gotten him drunk and molested him several times. The boy’s younger brother testified that he had seen Mr. Jackson groping his brother on two other occasions.

After 14 weeks of such testimony and seven days of deliberations, the jury returned not-guilty verdicts on all 14 counts against Mr. Jackson: four charges of child molesting, one charge of attempted child molesting, one conspiracy charge and eight possible counts of providing alcohol to minors. Conviction could have brought Mr. Jackson 20 years in prison. Instead, he walked away a free man to try to reclaim a career that at the time had already been in decline for years.

After his trial, Mr. Jackson largely left the United States for Bahrain, the island nation in the Persian Gulf, where he was the guest of Sheik Abdullah, a son of the ruler of the country, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. Mr. Jackson would never return to live at his ranch. Instead he remained in Bahrain, Dubai and Ireland for the next several years, managing his increasingly unstable finances. He remained an avid shopper, however, and was spotted at shopping malls in the black robes and veils traditionally worn by Bahraini women.

Despite the public relations blow of his trial, Mr. Jackson and his ever-changing retinue of managers, lawyers and advisers never stopped plotting his return.

By early this year, Mr. Jackson was living in a $100,000-a-month mansion in Bel-Air, to be closer to “where all the action is” in the entertainment business, his manager at the time, Tohme Tohme, told The Los Angeles Times. He was also preparing for his upcoming London shows.

”He was just so excited about having an opportunity to come back,” said Mr. Paterson, the director and choreographer.

Despite his troubles, the press and the public never abandoned the star. A crowd of paparazzi and onlookers lined the street outside Mr. Jackson’s home as the ambulance took him to the hospital.

Reporting was contributed by John M. Broder from Washington; Randal C. Archibold from Los Angeles; Susan Saulny from Gary, Ind.; and Melena Ryzik, Ben Sisario, Brian Stelter and Peter Keepnews from New York.

An Appraisal

A Sex Symbol Who Wanted to Be More

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Published: June 25, 2009
She really tried. And for a sex symbol that alone can be like an accomplishment.

A scrim of sadness covers Farrah Fawcett’s career. Her stardom traced that cautionary Hollywood arc: meteoric fame followed by years spent trying first to overcome it, then, too late, seeking to recapture it.

Cancer interrupted Ms. Fawcett’s attempted comeback in 2006 and put her on a different, more didactic track — pursued by a careful-what-you-wish-for flurry of publicity. She put the incessant tabloid intrusion to the service of her illness, making a video diary of her struggle with anal cancer that, among other things, allowed her to feel that she had some control over the coverage. NBC, never shy about exploiting a celebrity tragedy, overproduced and overpromoted her film in “Farrah’s Story,” but never made the public service point that, besides abstinence, the HPV vaccine is the most promising form of prevention against this type of cancer, which in most cases is sexually acquired.

Ms. Fawcett died Thursday at 62. And her last poignant appearances sometimes obscure a smaller, more gratifying story line of a celebrated beauty who worked against type to construct a more dignified second act. Long before Charlize Theron gained weight to make “Monster” and Nicole Kidman put on a fake nose to play Virginia Woolf, Ms. Fawcett scrubbed off her tawny good looks to play battered — and battering — women in “The Burning Bed” and “Extremities.”

There were many less successful performances as well and cameo roles in B movies, but Ms. Fawcett kept trying, and that’s more than can be said of many of today’s fading stars who coast on surgically preserved looks, cable reality shows and the culture’s insatiable hunger for celebrity abasement.

Bea Arthur, who died at 86 after a long, varied and joyous career, accomplished many things, perhaps most notably making the case on “Maude” and “The Golden Girls” that an older woman with a large frame, beak nose and stentorian voice could be an object of male desire. Ms. Fawcett was not as talented or as versatile. Still, while at the peak of her career she tried to show skeptics that an object of male desire can hold her own in roles usually reserved for less glamorous, better trained actresses.

Though, of course, it was her early work that kept her famous. Nobody in recent memory comes close to the giddy heights Farrah Fawcett reached in the mid-’70s with one season on “Charlie’s Angels” and That Poster. The pinup of Ms. Fawcett in a red one-piece bathing suit, tanned, head tossed, body lithe yet curvy, was a revelation. She looked delicious but also a little carnivorous, her gleaming white teeth frozen in a friendly but slightly feral smile. That poster ended up on every teenage boy’s bedroom wall and in the annals of pop culture — Farrah was the face, body and hair of the 1970s

More recently Ms. Fawcett became almost as well known as fame’s camp follower after a dizzy, incoherent interview on David Letterman in 1997..

That bad moment was reinforced by an ill-advised 2005 TV Land reality show, “Chasing Farrah,” the kind of doomed career defibrillator that was parodied so brilliantly by Lisa Kudrow in “The Comeback.” A camera crew followed Ms. Fawcett as she giggled and tossed her golden mane at movie openings and on shopping sprees — more Blanche DuBois than “Charlie’s Angels.” In one scene, as Ms. Fawcett strode ahead in a cloud of fans and paparazzi, a stocky, balding man in a T-shirt told the camera with a leer, “I’d do her,” as if that would be doing her a favor.

Ms. Fawcett left “Charlie’s Angels” after only one season, the queen of “jiggle TV.” She had a dazzling smile underscored by a whispery baby voice, a sweetness that allowed young male fantasists to believe that she would be a forgiving sex goddess. Bo Derek and Pamela Anderson, physical prodigies who took her place on dorm-room walls, seemed less approachable — they were positioned more as parodies of sex symbols than the real thing and seemed perfectly content in that niche.

Ms. Fawcett was built on a more human scale, a cheerleader from Corpus Christi, Tex., who radiated a healthy athleticism just ahead of the aerobics revolution led by Jane Fonda and Jamie Lee Curtis.

She made movies like “The Cannonball Run” but also set her sights on Broadway long before it became fashionable and profitable for theaters to boost ticket sales by recruiting television and movie stars to perform onstage. And in 1983 she dared to take over a role originated by Susan Sarandon in “Extremities,” in the grueling role of a rape victim who seeks revenge on her attacker. That performance led to “The Burning Bed,” a 1984 TV movie in which she played a battered wife and which was a television milestone; it helped her secure the lead in the 1985 film version of “Extremities.”

She took on other ambitious roles, not as persuasively perhaps, but they were brave choices nonetheless: the Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld in a 1986 television movie; the heiress Barbara Hutton a year later; and in 1989, the wartime photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White.

Her career took a detour in 1997 — that was the year of a Playboy spread and her infamous David Letterman interview, but it was also the year she played Robert Duvall’s wife in “The Apostle,” an affecting performance that was well received by critics, if not widely seen. She kept at it, though the offers kept shrinking; her last movie was a small part in “The Cookout,” the 2004 Queen Latifah comedy.

Toward the end, her private life — her son’s drug problems, her on-and-off relationship with the troubled Ryan O’Neal — eclipsed decades of work. Cancer brought it to an end.

Not all of her performances will stand the test of time, but what is worth remembering is how hard Farrah Fawcett tried.

Troubled Lebanese singer murdered in Dubai

Seguimiento al asesinato de Suzanne Tamim:

Court Confirms Death Sentence for Egyptian Tycoon

Asmaa Waguih/Reuters

Hisham Talaat Moustafa, center, was convicted of paying a hit man to kill a Lebanese pop star.

By MONA EL-NAGGAR

Published: June 25, 2009

CAIRO — A court on Thursday confirmed the death penalty for an Egyptian tycoon convicted of paying a hit man to kill a Lebanese pop star, in a case that has riveted the Arab world with its tantalizing blend of fame and fortune.

The tycoon, Hisham Talaat Moustafa, an Egyptian real estate developer and politician with an estimated net worth of $800 million in 2007, was initially sentenced to death in May for ordering the killing, but the punishment first had to be approved by Egypt’s chief religious official before the court could confirm it.

Mr. Moustafa’s lawyers have said they will appeal the verdict, but it is widely believed here that Thursday’s ruling is unprecedented in a country where money and power can often trump justice.

“It is a fair verdict and a respectable judge,” Belal Fadl, an Egyptian scriptwriter and columnist, said after the initial ruling. “It makes you think that the judicial institution is still alive in Egypt.”

Prosecutors said that Mr. Moustafa, 50, a member of Egypt’s governing National Democratic Party in the upper house of Parliament, paid $2 million to a former Egyptian state security officer to kill Suzanne Tamim, 30, a Lebanese singer who fled Egypt after a failed relationship with Mr. Moustafa.

The fact that the murder was committed and investigated in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, is an element that many analysts in Egypt say rendered Mr. Moustafa’s political influence useless in the face of his crime.

A statement issued by Egypt’s public prosecutor at the beginning of the yearlong case said that the man Mr. Moustafa hired to carry out the murder, Mohsen al-Sukari, had stayed in a hotel close to Ms. Tamim’s residence in Dubai. On July 28, 2008, he knocked on her door, disguised as an employee of the building, supposedly to deliver a gift and a letter. When Ms. Tamim opened the door, he attacked her with a knife and slit her throat, the statement said.

Mr. Sukari was also convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

Despite the court’s ruling, few here expect this to be the end of the story, or the end of Mr. Moustafa, who has close ties to the family of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak.

“This is essentially a political, not criminal, case about the marriage of power and money in Egypt,” said Magdy el-Gallad, the editor of the Egyptian independent daily Al Masry Al Youm, which dedicated more than 200 pages to the coverage of the Moustafa-Tamim saga. “It delivers a very strong message to all businessmen, but in the end, Hisham Talaat Moustafa will not be executed.”

Egyptian Tycoon Sentenced to Death for Murder

Nasser Nasser/Associated Press

A Cairo courtroom erupted Thursday after Hisham Talaat Moustafa was sentenced to death in the murder of the Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim. Egyptians assume that a man with his wealth and connections is above the law’s reach. More Photos

CAIRO — A wealthy and politically connected Egyptian businessman was sentenced to death on Thursday for hiring a hit man to kill a Lebanese pop singer in a case that has captivated the Middle East for nearly a year with its storyline of revenge, power and money.

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The Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim. More Photos >

The businessman, Hisham Talaat Moustafa, was a multimillionaire who seemed to have it all. He headed a real estate conglomerate, was a member of the upper house of Parliament and had close ties to the family of President Hosni Mubarak. He was part of the most elite strata of Egyptian society, a high roller of the type that Egyptians have long assumed to operate beyond the reach of the law.

Then Suzanne Tamim was found dead in July, slashed and stabbed in her apartment in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. She was 30, a pop diva and, it was charged, had fled from a failed relationship with Mr. Moustafa.

When rumors first spread of Mr. Moustafa’s links to the killing, Egypt’s leadership appeared to react instinctively, closing ranks to protect one of its own. But Egyptians have been growing increasingly frustrated with two scales of justice, one for the poor and one for the rich, political commentators here said. And there was pressure from Dubai, which was unwilling to let a murderer walk, no matter how rich and connected.

In the hours after the sentence was announced, it seemed as though Mr. Moustafa was all people could talk about in Cairo. People were astounded, and pleased, at the rare fall from grace.

“There is a fundamental element missing in the political system here, and this is the element of trust, the ability of the people to trust that their regime is just,” said Osama Ghazali Harb, an editor and researcher at the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “This verdict can bring citizens to have some trust in the judiciary, and it can have a positive outcome for the regime because people don’t trust it in general.”

Mr. Moustafa’s fate was sealed with a quick reading of the verdict. A little after 9 a.m. Judge Muhammadi Qunsuwa entered a run-down, litter-strewn courtroom in the center of Cairo. He said that the case would be referred to the nation’s highest religious official. It was instantly understood that that meant the death penalty.

Mr. Moustafa showed no emotion.

He stood in a prisoner’s cage, a black box of bars and metal mesh about seven feet tall. He wore a white prison jumpsuit and turned his back to the crush of journalists and family and friends who had crowded the room. The man who prosecutors say he hired, Mohsen al-Sukari, was in the cage next to him, reading the Koran.

He received a death sentence, too.

Mr. Moustafa was hustled out of the courtroom as the crowd surged toward the prisoner’s cage. Friends and family members cried out in shock, while his wife collapsed. A young man fainted and was carried out on an officer’s shoulder.

Mr. Sukari turned pale, crossed his arms over his chest and mumbled to himself before being taken away.

Under Egyptian law, the country’s chief religious official, Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, must review all death sentences. His decision will be handed down next month, but experts here said there was no reason to expect that he would overrule the judge.

Mr. Moustafa’s lawyers also said they would appeal the verdict and sentence, which under Egyptian law are delivered simultaneously.

The case of Mr. Moustafa and Ms. Tamim grabbed public attention because of the spectacular characters, and the locales involved: Dubai, the fast-moving emirate in the Persian Gulf with influence far beyond its size; and Egypt, the floundering, crisis-prone state where power and money often buy immunity from the law.

Egyptian officials were keen to point to the verdict on Thursday as proof that there is rule of law in Egypt, and that even someone as influential as Mr. Moustafa could be forced to pay the ultimate penalty for his crime.

Ms. Tamim was murdered in Dubai, but Egypt does not allow its citizens to be extradited, so the trial took place here. In the beginning, it appeared that Mr. Moustafa would benefit from his social and political standing. Courts ordered that the case not be covered in the press, and Mr. Moustafa retained his parliamentary immunity.

But that changed, a result, some say, of pressure from the United Arab Emirates and a need to calm local hostility toward Egypt’s elite. There was outrage earlier this year when a court initially acquitted another important businessman in connection with the deaths of about 1,000 people when a ferry he owned sank.

Mr. Moustafa was arrested in September and charged with paying $2 million to Mr. Sukari, a former police officer who had worked in security at a hotel Mr. Moustafa owned.

Mr. Moustafa, who was 49 at the time of his arrest, had an estimated net worth of $800 million in 2007. He was one of Egypt’s largest real estate developers and a member of Mr. Mubarak’s governing National Democratic Party.

Ms. Tamim became famous after winning the regional equivalent of “American Idol,” called Studio Al Fann. Her career took off but her personal life was plagued by failed relationships, and when she moved to Cairo she was entangled in a bitter divorce from her second husband.

She met Mr. Moustafa after her move. He offered to help revive her career and then, according to news media reports, they became romantically involved.

But she evidently tired of him and eventually moved to Dubai and married a kickboxing champion.

Prosecutors charged that Mr. Moustafa was enraged and hired Mr. Sukari, who was arrested in Egypt shortly after the killing at the request of the authorities in the Emirates.

When the case first came to public attention in Egypt, the authorities tried to keep the details secret, a move widely interpreted as a signal that someone connected was involved.

But in the end, commentators here said Egypt’s leaders decided that the political costs of protecting Mr. Moustafa were too steep, so they decided in this instance to allow the law to be applied without interference.

“The general guiding rule is the interest of the regime,” said Belal Fadl, a columnist with the independent newspaper Al Masry al Yom. “At this particular moment, the regime’s interest is to prove to people here and to the outside world that it is not a corrupt system.”

Mr. Moustafa saw it differently. In a letter written from his jail cell before his trial, he insisted that he was innocent and that he was the victim of jealousy because of his success.

“I keep asking myself every moment in my cell: Why is this happening to me?” he wrote. “Why am I facing all this distortion and destruction and lies that nobody faced before? Why is this happening to me, while everyone knows who I am and how I am disciplined, serious and committed to my faith and my duties towards God?”

Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.

Suzanne Tamim - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Suzanne Tamim


Suzanne Tamim (Arabic: سوزان تميم‎, September 23, 1977 – July 28, 2008) was a Lebanese singer and actress, who rose to fame in the Arab world after having won the top prize in the popular Studio el fan television show in 1996. She was found murdered^[1] in an apartment in Dubai Marina. On September 2, 2008, Hisham Talaat, a wealthy Egyptian businessman and lawmaker, was arrested in Cairo and accused of paying $2 million to have Tamim killed.[

Tamim won fame after appearing on a TV talent show in Lebanon in
1996, but her career was marred by stories about a troubled private
life. Soon afterward, news about her divorce from her first husband Ali
Muzannar flooded the media.

Tamim later married Lebanese impresario and producer Adel Matouk,
who became her manager. Once they divorced, Tamim was thought to have
fled from her home in Beirut to Egypt after Matouk filed a series of
lawsuits against her, including embezzlement, fraud and slander and
libel.

Reports say she disappeared from public view in Cairo in 2007 and was thought to be living in Dubai's exclusive Jumeirah district.

Musical career

After winning a Gold Medal on Studio el fan,
she was a hailed both for her beauty and as well as a voice that was
equally suited to pop tunes and classical Arabic melodies. Tamim's last
album was produced by production giant Rotana and called Saken Alby
in 2002 which made a high records in selling it from the 1st day. Her
last song, "Beirut," recorded in 2006, was dedicated to the memory of
slain Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Death

Suzan Tamim was found murdered in her apartment in Dubai, July 28, 2008.^[3][4] While it was reported that she had been beheaded,^[5] the lawyer of her former husband let it be known that her death certificate indicates that her throat was slit.^[6]

A 39-year-old man from Egypt was arrested as the alleged murderer in early August in Cairo.^[7] The suspect, whose name was being withheld, was reported to have died in police custody in early August 2008,^[8] however subsequently the police reported him to be alive.^[9] The alleged killer had apparently confessed the murder and is linked to Hisham Talaat Mustafa, a prominent and influential businessman in Egypt and member of the Shura Council who has denied any connection to her death.^[8]
While initally Egyptian newspapers reported freely about the death,
once the case was linked to the businessman, the Chief Prosecutor
forbade reporting about the case;^[5] an edition of a newspaper that defied the order was confiscated.^[10]

On September 2, 2008, Hisham Talaat Moustafa, the son of the Egyptian tycoon Talaat Mostafa, was arrested by Egyptian justice officers and charged over the murder.^[11]The
indictment charges former police officer Muhsen el-Sukkari with killing
Tamim on July 28 in return for $2 million from company chairman Hesham
Talaat Moustafa.^[12]

References

1. ^ "Troubled Lebanese singer murdered in Dubai", Alarabiya (2008-07-30). Retrieved on 2008-07-30.
2. ^ "Egyptian lawmaker arrested in death of pop singer", Associated Press (2008-09-02). Retrieved on 2008-09-02.

“What I still fail to understand is why we are exposed to the risks of an American investment,” she added, “but not to the environmental protections e

Thanks for smoking!??? Frost/Nixon ?

In the Andes, a Toxic Site Also Provides a Livelihood

Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Children doing schoolwork at a poorhouse in La Oroya. Ninety-seven percent of children in La Oroya under the age of 6 had lead levels that would be considered toxic, according to a 2005 study.

By SIMON ROMERO

Published: June 24, 2009

LA OROYA, Peru — Claudia Albino, a washerwoman who earns about $3 a day and lives in a one-room hovel with her family in this bleak town high in the Andes, might seem at first to have nothing to do with Ira Rennert, the reclusive New York billionaire who built one of the largest homes in the United States, an Italianate mansion sprawling over more than 66,000 square feet in the Hamptons.

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Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Children played soccer next to the American-owned smelter Doe Run Peru in La Oroya. It has been called one of the world’s 10 most polluted places.

The New York Times

But Mr. Rennert’s privately held industrial empire includes the smelter with a towering smokestack that overlooks Ms. Albino’s home, so the health and economic fate of her and thousands of others here rest on the corporate maneuvers he is carrying out.

La Oroya has been called one of the world’s 10 most polluted places by the Blacksmith Institute, a nonprofit group that studies toxic sites. But for several months, the Peruvian smelting company in Mr. Rennert’s empire has claimed that low metals prices prevented it from completing a timely cleanup to lower the emissions that have given this town such an ignoble distinction.

The tensions here over the lead emissions and the smelter’s financial meltdown is precisely the kind of dire mix of foreign investment and environmental contamination feared by indigenous groups elsewhere in Peru, particularly in the country’s Amazon basin, where protests over similar issues left dozens dead this month.

Citing financial difficulties, the smelter’s Peruvian operators, who have idled most of its operations, have threatened to close entirely for several months, putting in danger 3,000 jobs at the plant and thousands more who rely on it like Ms. Albino, who washes clothes for the wives of smelter workers.

This week, some workers and residents protested against the possible closing, halting traffic and commerce along the highway that descends from La Oroya to the capital, Lima. Then on Tuesday, the government signaled that it might be open to extending the October deadline for the cleanup. Officials involved in talks on Wednesday said that one possible solution to the impasse would involve giving workers some control of the plant.

“This man Rennert, I’ve heard of him on television, of his great wealth and the homes he has around the world,” said Ms. Albino. “As for me, I cannot afford to test the lead levels in my daughters’ blood any longer,” she said, attributing the stunted growth of her youngest daughter, 7, to the smelter’s emissions.

Residents of La Oroya, with a population of 35,000, talk about the lead in their blood like people elsewhere discuss the weather. Ninety-seven percent of children under the age of 6 had lead levels that would be considered toxic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, according to a 2005 study by scientists from Saint Louis University.

But while some here seethe against Mr. Rennert and the company, Doe Run Peru, others defend them for providing work, making for a sharply divided town.

“We are thankful to Doe Run,” said Elizabeth Canales, 40, a seamstress and a member of a company-supported group that teaches hygiene to poor families here. “It truly saddens me because I don’t know if this is happening because there’s a misunderstanding.”

Some publicly praise Doe Run Peru while requesting, amid fear of retribution, anonymity to vent their anger at the company. “This town is owned by one company, and we vassals cannot be seen as disloyal to our owners,” said one longtime worker.

The discord between those for and against the company festers in La Oroya’s labyrinthine streets, packed with stands selling foods like seasoned guinea pig and bars catering to the plant’s workers, who largely move here from other parts of Peru and earn salaries that dwarf those of other residents.

Insults and threats are common. Some workers at the plant recently paraded an effigy of Archbishop Pedro Barreto, an outspoken critic of the company’s environmental record, burning it at the culmination of their protest.

“When insults don’t work, the company resorts to intimidation, and when that fails, to blackmail, which is what it’s doing now by saying it will shut the plant unless it gets an extension for its cleanup,” said Pedro Córdova, 50, a production mechanic at the smelter who is suing the company over health claims related to a lung ailment.

Environmental activists in La Oroya said they saw parallels between Doe Run Peru’s strategies here and those employed elsewhere by Renco, Mr. Rennert’s holding company. Even as his fortune remained intact, they contend, some Renco companies in the United States faced complaints over environmental contamination and went into bankruptcy earlier this decade.

Through a spokesman in New York, Mr. Rennert declined to be interviewed, and Renco would say only that it was in talks aimed at “reaching a viable solution.”

Doe Run Peru claims that it has “dramatically reduced” the toxic emissions at the smelter since buying it from Peru’s government in 1997, leading to “a radical improvement in environmental conditions.”

Still, researchers contend Doe Run Peru has misled officials by using 1997, the year it took control of the smelter, as a point of comparison for pollution levels, since contamination climbed that year. “Doe Run Peru has overseen an absolute increase in contamination in La Oroya,” said Corey Laplante, an American scholar who researched La Oroya at the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law in Lima.

Despite being pressed by workers here to find a solution, officials in Lima this week said they had concerns about taking over or intervening in the company, pointing to legal battles that could arise from taking some control of a foreign-owned asset.

News reports that Renco had tried this month to buy the Swedish automaker Saab, led angry residents here to ask why Doe Run Peru could not complete its cleanup or prevent a shutdown of the smelter at a time when metal prices have begun to climb again.

Nearly everyone here wants the smelter to remain open and for the cleanup to proceed. But with Peru forging closer ties to the United States in Latin America through its new trade deal with Washington, some here question the benefits of such a pact.

“It’s like we’re pawns in a game,” said Rosa Amaro, 52, a leader of an environmental group here. “What I still fail to understand is why we are exposed to the risks of an American investment,” she added, “but not to the environmental protections enjoyed by the citizens of the United States.”

Andrea Zarate contributed reporting from Lima, Peru.

At Home in Versailles on the Atlantic

By JULIA C. MEAD

Published: Sunday, July 4, 2004

AFTER five years of construction and controversy, the wealthy industrialist Ira Rennert has received a certificate of occupancy allowing his family to move into their 66,395-square-foot Italianate mansion on the ocean here.

His neighbors aren't exactly revving up the welcome wagon. In 1998, they were sufficiently enraged by the idea of a house five times larger than their own to complain repeatedly to the Town of Southampton. They hired consultants to assess the potential impact of the Rennert mansion on the neighborhood, and they sued to stop the town from issuing building permits. The lawsuit failed, but the town has since passed a law limiting houses to 20,000 square feet.

The mansion, part of a 63-acre estate called Fair Field, is the largest on the East End and one of the largest in the United States. It encompasses several buildings and has 29 bedrooms, 3 dining rooms, 3 swimming pools side by side, a 164-seat theater and a recreation pavilion with a basketball court, gym and a 2-lane bowling alley.

Neighbors have expressed concerns that the mansion might become a resort or religious retreat, which might create traffic and environmental problems. They speculated that it might used as a hideaway for one particularly high-profile friend of the Rennerts -- Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister and the current finance minister.

Until last week, Mr. Rennert, 70, had maintained a steadfast public silence, declining for years to talk to reporters or to address speculation about what might go on behind his thick hedgerows. But last Sunday morning, while sitting with his 25-year-old son, Ari, he described Fair Field as the place where he would spend his old age, surrounded by activity and family. Mr. Rennert and his wife, Ingeborg, also have two married daughters and one granddaughter. They also have homes in Manhattan and Jerusalem.

''I'm buying old age and loneliness insurance,'' Mr. Rennert said, chuckling as he waved a hand toward the mansion. He acknowledged that with 29 bedrooms, he could find plenty of company. ''I'm trying to convince him of that,'' he said, nodding toward his son, who smiled sheepishly.

Wearing track pants and running shoes, his tanned face framed by a leonine mane of white hair, Mr. Rennert sidestepped a question about the sort of relationship he expected to have with his neighbors. Then he briefly addressed reports that his estate would be put to uses other than as a single-family house.

''This has been done by just a few people with emotional and psychological problems,'' he said. ''And I don't want to get into that.''

He said he had no intention of using the mansion as a religious retreat or a resort and would not ever sell it. He would not say how much the mansion cost to build.

As for Mr. Netanyahu's living there, Mr. Rennert's public-relations consultant, Steven Rubenstein, said that Mr. Netanyahu was too busy in Israel to consider moving to the Hamptons. ''This is a home for the Rennert family,'' said Mr. Rubenstein, whose Manhattan firm, Rubenstein Communications Inc., also represents the Israeli Consulate in Manhattan. Mr. Rennert said he had good reason to maintain his anonymity: ''I have a wife and children I need to protect.'' Asked whether he was protecting their privacy, he shook his head almost imperceptibly but did not answer.

In its issue of Feb. 17, 2003, Business Week said that Mr. Rennert earned his first $500 million selling high-yield junk bonds in the 1990's and used that fortune to finance an private industrial empire held under the umbrella of his Renco Group. Through Renco, he owns AM General, the manufacturer of the supersize Hummer sport utility vehicles and the Humvee military vehicles.

Federal regulators and environmentalists have pursued Mr. Rennert, filing at least a dozen lawsuits, calling his smokestack businesses -- which make steel and produce magnesium, lead and coal -- some of the country's worst polluters, Forbes Magazine reported on July 22, 2002. ''Bondholders would like to tear him into many small pieces,'' Forbes said, adding that investors lost about $700 million on the $1.5 billion in bonds his companies issued from 1992 to 1998.

Whatever problems investors may have had, Mr. Rennert has been generous to Jewish and Israeli causes, bestowing the Rennert name on a women's Torah study program in Israel and endowing a chair in Judaic studies at Barnard College. He has also given large donations to Yeshiva University and the Center for Jewish History in New York.

Mr. Rennert said that he already had some pet charities on the South Fork but that because he is an Orthodox Jew who observes the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, it might be difficult for him and his family to attend weekend benefits.

''I want a normal life,'' he said, adding that he did not want to seek publicity.

Fair Field, whose buildings cover about 110,000 square feet altogether, is unparalleled on the East End in sheer girth and luxury. The U-shaped mansion, covered in what appears to be buff-colored stucco, has two courtyards, each with a fountain, and is surrounded by English-style formal gardens, an orangery, guardhouses at the entrances and its own power plant.

Long Island has other huge houses, of course. Idle Hour, constructed in Oakdale for William K. Vanderbilt, had 110 rooms and 70,000 square feet. It is now part of Dowling College and is no longer used as a residence. Oheka Castle, in Huntington, completed in 1917 for Otto Kahn, has 72 rooms, including 25 bathrooms, and covers some 62,000 square feet. It is now a catering hall.

George W. Vanderbilt's estate in Asheville, N.C., completed in 1895 and appropriately named Biltmore, claims to be the largest private house in the United States. Its main mansion has 250 rooms covering 175,000 square feet.

Told of Fair Field's total of 110,000 square feet, Sarah Thomas, Biltmore's public relations coordinator, laughed. ''Wow,'' she said. ''That's probably as close as anyone's gotten to us in a long time.''

The neighbors' reactions to Mr. Rennert and his mansion have been mixed. William Tillotson, a Narrow Lane resident and co-chairman of the Sagaponack Citizens Advisory Committee, which acts as a conduit to the Town Board, said: ''It would be neat if he came to our meetings. He must have a point of view on something. But my guess is, we'll never see him. The butler will do all the shopping.''

While fishing last winter on Moose Head Lake in Maine, Mr. Tillotson said, he met an airplane pilot who described a recent flight over the South Fork. ''He said he saw some huge industrial project being built out here, with fields around it,'' Mr. Tillotson said. ''He was pretty surprised when I told him it was just a house.''

Although Fair Field is hard to miss, Jennifer Pike, who runs a farm stand on nearby Sagg Main Street with her husband, Jim, said she had not looked at it in years. ''I just don't notice it,'' Ms. Pike said. ''It doesn't bother me in the least.''

But Sandy Gross, who lives in Water Mill but bikes and swims in adjacent Sagaponack, said of the mansion: ''It's obscene and so excessive. Everyone wants to look at it it's like Versailles, but no one can believe it. It's arrogant.''

Donald Sachar, a citizens' advisory committee member, called the house ''an elephant in our living room, horribly intrusive.''

Other neighbors are resigned. On a recent Saturday afternoon, a woman named Gia -- she refused to give her last name -- was supervising two girls operating a lemonade stand across Daniels Lane from the Rennert estate. The mansion now obscures the second-story view of the ocean from her house, Gia said. ''We could have had 20 houses built on a property that size, but we only have one,'' she added, ''so we have to come to terms with it.''

Gia noted that Mr. Rennert had paid to repave part of Daniels Lane that was torn up by construction equipment being moved to his property, and she said that having such a wealthy family as neighbors could have its benefits.

According to town records, Fair Field, though not yet fully completed, already has an assessed value of $170 million and will owe $392,610 in property taxes this year. Of that, about $100,000 is earmarked for school taxes, representing nearly a tenth of the budget for Sagaponack's one-room school.

Mr. Rennert stressed that every aspect of the construction of Fair Field had complied with the law. When neighbors complained last year about his adding 4,000 tons of sand to raise the height of the dune that runs for about 1,000 feet between his mansion and the public beach, the town found that he had the requisite permits for that, too.

For some neighbors, the rise of Fair Field signaled the end of their resistance to the project. Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist, once famously announced that if Mr. Rennert were permitted to build, he would pack his bags and leave Sagaponack. Mr. Vonnegut did not return calls to his summer residence on Sagg Main Street, but his wife, the writer Jill Krementz, did. She said they were staying put.

''For a year, people were telling us they would miss us,'' she said. ''Thank God I own half the house. He can't sell it out from under me.''

She added that she hoped her outspoken husband would not comment further. ''I don't want him to say anything that will get us kicked off the guest list,'' she said, laughing. ''Maybe they'll ask us over to go bowling.''

Diane Louvel, who lives a short bicycle ride away in Wainscott, was sitting with two friends in front of the Sag General Store on a recent Saturday afternoon. Ms. Louvel said she had pedaled past Fair Field at every stage of construction and finds its completion anticlimactic.

''I don't think it's such a big deal, just a huge Italian villa,'' she said with a shrug. ''I guess it's just chateau envy.''

Harry Mumford, one of Mr. Rennert's closest neighbors, spends summers with his wife, Julia, in a tiny cottage just across Daniels Lane. He said Mr. Rennert had applied for permits to build a private home and that's what Mr. Mumford believes Fair Field will be.

''It's a whopper, but it's just a house,'' he said. ''I doubt the Rennerts would come over for a cup of coffee, but I'd have them. That's what neighbors do. Maybe I'll deliver a plate a brownies.''

Then he wondered aloud if the brownies would ever make it past the guardhouse.

Photos: CHATEAU ENVY -- Fair Field, Ira Rennert's 63-acre estate, has 29 bedrooms, 3 dining rooms, 3 swimming pools, a 164-seat theater and a recreation pavilion with a basketball court, gym and bowling alley. (Photographs by Doug Kuntz for The New York Times)(pg. 1); The gate to Fair Field on Daniels Lane in Sagaponack. There are guardhouses at each entrance. Ingeborg and Ira Rennert attended a fund-raiser for the Guggenheim Museum in December 2001. (Photo by Doug Kuntz for The New York Times); (Photo by Bill Cunningham/The New York Times)(pg. 6)

Iquitos Journal

Adopting Forebears’ Faith and Leaving Peru for Israel

Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Peruvian Jews celebrating the Sabbath at a synagogue in Iquitos

By SIMON ROMERO

Published: June 21, 2009

His dream, which he has vigorously pursued, is to persuade the descendants of Sephardic merchants who settled in this remote corner of the Amazon basin more than a century ago to reaffirm their ties to Judaism and emigrate to Israel.

“It is getting very lonely here,” said Mr. Reátegui Levy, 52, an inspector at Peru’s national oil company, referring to the more than 400 descendants of Jewish pioneers who have formally converted to Judaism this decade, including about 160 members of his immediate and extended family. Nearly all of them now live in Israel.

Until recently, such a rebirth of Judaism here seemed unlikely. The history of Jews in Iquitos, dating from the late-19th-century rubber boom that transformed this far-flung Amazonian outpost into a once thriving city of imported Italian marble and a theater designed by Gustave Eiffel, was almost forgotten.

But Mr. Reátegui Levy and a handful of others began organizing the descendants of dozens of Jews from places as varied as Morocco, Gibraltar, Malta, England and France who had settled here and deeper in the jungle, opening trading houses and following their star in search of riches and adventure.

The rubber trade collapsed, and fortunes here and downriver in the Brazilian city of Manaus vanished. Some Jewish immigrants perished young, succumbing to diseases like cholera. A few stayed, marrying local women and raising families. Others returned home, leaving behind descendants who clung to a belief that they were Jews.

“It was astounding to discover that in Iquitos there existed this group of people who were desperate to reconnect to their roots and re-establish ties to the broader Jewish world,” said Lorry Salcedo Mitrani, the director of a new documentary, “The Fire Within,” about the Jews of the Peruvian Amazon.

Scholars compare the Jews here with groups like the Hispanic crypto-Jews of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, the Lemba of southern Africa or the Bene Israel of India, who in varying ways have sought to reclaim a Jewish identity that had seemingly been weakened through time.

“We were isolated for so many decades, living on the jungle’s edge in a Catholic society without rabbis or a synagogue, in which all we had were some vague notions of what it meant to be Jewish,” Mr. Reátegui Levy said.

“But when I was a child, my mother told me something that forever burned into my mind,” he said. “She told me, ‘You are a Jew, and you are never to forget that.’ ”

Iquitos lies four degrees south of the Equator, reachable only by boat or plane. Isolation, intermarriage and assimilation nearly wiped out the vestiges of Judaism here. Storefronts chiseled with Jewish surnames like Foinquinos and Cohen, and a cemetery ravaged by vandals, served as some of the few reminders of the community that once thrived here.

But by the end of the 1990s, some of these descendants, including Mr. Reátegui Levy, were brought together by Víctor Edery, a patriarchal figure who organized religious ceremonies in his own home, keeping a few customs alive even if it was done by blending Jewish and Christian beliefs.

Still, the existence of the Jews of Iquitos posed some philosophical challenges to some Jews elsewhere. Since nearly all the Jews who originally settled here were men, their descendants could not attest to having Jewish mothers, ruling them out as being Jewish according to strict interpretations of Jewish law.

Moreover, the Jewish community of about 3,000 people in Lima, the capital, largely preferred to ignore the Jews of Iquitos, some scholars say, in part because of the thorny issues that the Jews here posed about race and origins. This is, after all, a country where a small light-skinned elite still wields considerable economic and political power — and Lima’s Jews are often seen as an elite within that elite.

“The notion of a Jew who looks like an Indian and lives in a poor house in a small city in the middle of the jungle is, at best, an exotic footnote to the official history of Peru’s Jewry as Lima sees it,” said Ariel Segal, a Venezuelan-born Israeli historian whose arrival here in the 1990s to study the community also helped serve as a catalyst for the Iquitos Jews to organize.

By the start of this decade, the Jews here were gathering to observe Shabbat each Friday and during the High Holy Days at the home of the patriarch, Mr. Edery. After he died, they met on Próspero Street at the home of Jorge Abramovitz, 60, whose father, a Polish Jew, moved here long after the collapse of the rubber boom.

While they lacked a rabbi, they conducted services in Hebrew they learned from cassette tapes. They cleaned their cemetery and began burying their dead there again. They persisted in their campaign to be recognized as Jews and to be allowed to emigrate to Israel.

Finally, they persuaded Guillermo Bronstein, the chief rabbi of Lima’s largest Ashkenazi synagogue, to oversee two large conversions, easing the way for hundreds to move to Israel. The exodus included nearly the entire Levy clan, descended from Joseph Levy, an adventurer who put down stakes here in the 19th century.

Mr. Reátegui Levy, the oil field inspector, moved in 2005 with his wife and six children to Ramla, a dusty city southeast of Tel Aviv. But despite dreaming for decades of such a move, he said he had trouble adjusting to Israeli life.

He said he missed his house with cacao and passion fruit trees, and the status of being a manager at PetroPerú. He murmured something, just audible over the din of this city’s thousands of motorcycle rickshaws, about losing the spark of love with his wife.

So, unlike nearly all the Iquiteños who moved to Israel, Mr. Reátegui Levy moved back, alone.

He still attends Shabbat at Mr. Abramovitz’s home each week, along with 40 or so other regulars who dream of formally converting and moving to Israel. While their numbers have dwindled, he encourages them and regales them with tales of fertile land in the Golan Heights and the bravery of his eldest son, Uri, who is in the Israeli Army.

But something keeps Mr. Reátegui Levy here in Iquitos, the same decaying jungle city that attracted his great-grandfather from Tangier so many decades ago. “My family, my heart and soul, all that I hold dear are in Israel,” he said. “Maybe I am back here for a reason.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 26, 2009
The Iquitos Journal article on Monday, about the Jews of Iquitos, Peru, a decaying Amazon jungle city that thrived as a 19th century trading post before the decline of the rubber business, referred incorrectly to the location of Manaus, Brazil, another Amazon jungle city that suffered when the rubber business weakened. It is downriver from Iquitos, not upriver.

Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Ronald Reátegui Levy, a Jewish oil field inspector, has persuaded many Jews in the town to move to Israel.

desmembraron el cadáver y "cocinaron" los restos en una empresa de concreto

Acusan a 2 hombres de asesinar y "cocinar" a guatemalteco

08 de Junio de 2009, 10:16pm ET

BOSTON (AP) - Un entrenador de fútbol estadounidense y otro hombre presuntamente asesinaron a un traficante de cocaína guatemalteco para no pagarle un adeudo, desmembraron el cadáver y "cocinaron" los restos en una empresa de concreto, dijo el lunes la fiscalía.

Los hombres, identificados como Daniel Bradley, de 47 años, y Paul Moccia, de 48, se declararon el lunes inocentes de las acusaciones de asesinato que pesan en su contra por la desaparición del guatemalteco Angel Antonio Ramírez, un empleado de la construcción.

Moccia conoció a Ramírez cerca de la empresa de concreto, que es copropiedad de Bradley, y le disparó por la espalda con una pistola calibre .357, indicó el fiscal adjunto del Distrito de Norfolk, Robert Nelson.

Moccia le adeudaba a Ramírez unos 70.000 dólares derivados de drogas que le había comprado y decidió matarlo en vez de pagarle, dijeron las autoridades. Bradley desmembró los restos del guatemalteco e intentó deshacerse de ellos de una vez por todas, denunció Nelson.

"Fue cocinado", agregó.

Los fiscales no dijeron por qué llegaron a esa teoría o cómo el cadáver fue "cocinado" o desaparecido.

Los abogados defensores indicaron que sus clientes son inocentes y destacaron que la fiscalía no ha logrado presentar el cadáver.

La fiscalía considera que las pruebas forenses que se obtengan de la fábrica de concreto fortalecerán su caso en contra de los acusados, dijo Nelson. Los detectives hallaron manchas de sangre al interior de la fábrica de concreto RJ Bradley Co. Inc., agregó, así como en un par de botas de Bradley en casa de éste.

Bradley es un entrenador asistente de fútbol estadounidense en la Secundaria Xaverian Brothers. La escuela no respondió a los mensajes dejados en su buzón de voz después de la hora del cierre.

Moccia se dedica a cobrar cuotas de peaje en una carretera. Ambos permanecerán detenidos sin derecho a fianza.

La audiencia previa al juicio fue programada para el 7 de julio.

6 de Junio 2009

RAYO MATÓ 32 VACAS

Treinta y dos vacas quedaron infladas y tiesas al pie de un árbol, en una finca ganadera de San Vito, Coto Brus. Su dueño Rubén Naranjo, de 76 años, indicó que el hato costaba ¢20 millones, los ahorros de toda su vida. (Foto: Roberto Fernández, corresponsal)

Corresponsal

El finquero observaba alrededor de un árbol el esfuerzo de toda su vida.

Rubén Naranjo, de 76 años, encontró todo su ganado muerto, la mañana de ayer.

El finquero llegó para arrear las vacas a otro potrero donde pudieran alimentarse mejor, pero un rayo que cayó la noche del jueves fulminó las 32, valoradas en más de ¢20 millones. Esa era la inversión de toda su vida.

Su arduo trabajo cotidiano se vio truncado al encontrar las reses alrededor de un árbol, infladas como sapos gigantes y tiesas.

Era muy peligroso dejar estos animales descomponerse a la intemperie y en ese estado, por eso personeros de la Municipalidad de Coto Brus, encabezados por el propio alcalde Rafael Navarro, con maquinaria del ayuntamiento hicieron un hueco para enterrarlas.

Ahora don Rubén Naranjo deberá empezar de nuevo y desde cero.

David Carradine, the star of the 1970s television series “Kung Fu” and the title villain of the “Kill Bill” movies, has died in Thailand

David Carradine

June 4, 2009, 10:29 am

David Carradine Dies

By Dave Itzkoff

Mark Mainz/Getty Images David Carradine More Photos »

David Carradine, the star of the 1970s television series “Kung Fu” and the title villain of the “Kill Bill” movies, has died in Thailand, The Associated Press reported. The United States Embassy in Bangkok told The A.P. that Mr. Carradine had been found dead in his hotel suite in Bangkok, where he was working on a movie. He was 72.

Mr. Carradine was part of an acting family that included his father, John; his brother, Bruce, and half-brothers Keith and Robert; and his nieces Ever Carradine and Martha Plimpton.

After a short run as the title character in the 1966 television adaptation of the Western “Shane,” he found fame in the 1972 series “Kung Fu” as Kwai Chang Caine, a wanderer raised by Shaolin monks to be a martial arts master. He enjoyed a career resurgence in recent years when he was cast by Quentin Tarantino in the action movies “Kill Bill: Vol. 1″ and “Vol. 2.”

Updated | 10:58 a.m. Thai police have told BBC News that Mr. Carradine was found on Thursday morning by a hotel maid in a wardrobe with a rope around his neck.
June 4, 2009, 1:41 pm

Our Favorite David Carradine Moment

By Dave Itzkoff

The Superman monologue from “Kill Bill, Vol. 2″:

Related: David Carradine Dies

AN APPRECIATION

The yin-yang of David Carradine

He seemed at once calm and explosive. See: 'Kung Fu' and 'Kill Bill.'

By Reed Johnson
June 5, 2009

As an actor, and possibly as a human being, David Carradine was a walking yin-yang symbol, a bundle of opposites tightly stitched together.

As a younger man, his lean, taut frame suggested both graceful self-possession and a capacity for explosive violence. Several of his best roles, both in film and television, cast him as a thinking-person's action hero, poised in perpetual tension between contemplative inner peace and outward aggression and hostility.

In his most iconic role, Kwai Chang Caine, the philosophy-spouting, butt-kicking hero of ABC's drama "Kung Fu" (1972-75), he played a half-Chinese man who was raised by Shaolin monks. On the lam in the American Old West, in search of his half-brother, Caine (like his biblical namesake) was a man divided against himself: a soft-spoken, flute-playing martial arts demon; a wandering loner who reached deep into prairie folks' souls by uttering Zen-like paradoxes.

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  STORY:

  David Carradine dies at 72; star of 'Kung Fu'

The show caught the tenor of its times. It arrived toward the tail-end of the hippie counterculture movement, when Americans were questioning "Establishment" authority and dabbling in Eastern mysticism, reading books such as Robert Pirsig's novel, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." A year earlier, the cult film "Billy Jack" had fused karate-macho antics with the figure of a rebellious antihero.

Caine, a kind of bareheaded, bare-footed, 19th century beatnik poet, reflected a national mood of vague spiritual yearning, mixed with unease over the durability of Western values, and partially prompted by the United States' dispiriting experience with the Vietnam War.

Three decades later, Quentin Tarantino would seize on Carradine's dualistic (and dueling) star persona when he cast him as the title character in "Kill Bill." The sprawling, two-part epic drew on Hong Kong martial arts movies and Italian spaghetti westerns, and was shaped by contrasting Eastern and Western notions of the aesthetics and metaphysics of violence.

The actor, who made more than 100 films over a more than 40-year career, was found dead on June 3 in his hotel room in Bangkok, where he had been on location shooting a movie. Details remain murky. Police reported that the actor had been found by a hotel maid, dead in a wardrobe with a rope around his neck and body. But Carradine's manager said the actor had died of natural causes.

A member of the dynastic Carradine acting clan, which also includes family patriarch John Carradine and half-siblings Keith and Robert, David Carradine studied music and served in the Army before taking up stage acting. He landed his first bit-part film role in an adaptation of Louis L'Amour's western novel "Taggart."

Carradine's rugged, hard-to-place features and his terse, sometimes laconic manner gave him the ability to be cast in roles as varied as Caine, folk troubadour Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's "Bound for Glory" (1976), and as a renegade driver in Paul Bartel's 1975 apocalyptic thriller “Death Race 2000,” which prefigured George Miller's "Mad Max" films.

Destructive impulses, and the individual's struggle to master them and bend them toward good, was a recurring motif in Carradine's film and TV roles. Good men, in Carradine's acting universe, may harbor brutal instincts and yield to primitive reflexes. Bad men, despite their flaws, may adhere to their own rigid, if twisted, codes of honor.

In Walter Hill's 1980 western “The Long Riders,”, Carradine was cast with his brothers Keith and Robert as members of the outlaw Younger gang. The movie included a memorable scene in which Carradine squares off in a saloon knife fight, a riveting piece of cinematic choreography that invited viewers simply to enjoy the actor's physicality and calculated stoicism.

Carradine could evince a very convincing, sinewy toughness, one that he used in other roles to memorable effect. Caine's gently quizzical manner had been replaced by an insinuating, softly menacing voice and a hard stare. You wouldn't want to mess with this guy.

Carradine's martial arts proficiency was largely faked in "Kung Fu." But the actor later took up these skills and even turned out a video series in martial arts training that he produced and starred in. In fact, Carradine dined out on this martial-arts-guru image for years, even deploying it for tongue-in-cheek television commercials. And while his résumé kept growing, many of his late-career roles were forgettable lower-end features.

Married five times, Carradine had a personal life as volatile as any of his film roles. One reviewer described Carradine's autobiography, "Endless Highway," as a "dreary catalog of human disaster," i.e. the actor's own life. Characteristically candid in public -- sometimes disarmingly, sometimes abrasively -- he acknowledged struggling with both drug and alcohol abuse.

His complex nature flared up in public this spring during an American Cinematheque screening and discussion of "Bound for Glory," at which Carradine got into an extended shouting match with audience members and Haskell Wexler, the esteemed cinematographer who won an Oscar for "Bound for Glory." According to a lengthy account of the evening by entertainment writer Chris Willman, Carradine lashed out against labor unions and publicly berated Wexler for making "Bound for Glory" look too beautiful.

"I would have said, turn up the contrast, show the grit under the fingernails, don't make any beauty about it, make it [expletive] ugly," Willman quotes Carradine declaring to the stunned audience and the visibly (and understandably) infuriated Wexler.

Carradine will be remembered for his grittiness, to be sure, but also for imparting a certain strange beauty to ugly acts and dark arts.

reed.johnson@latimes.com

"Kung Fu" actor David Carradine found hanged in Thai hotel
BANGKOK/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actor David Carradine, star of the 1970s U.S. television show "Kung Fu," was found naked and hanging dead from a rope in the closet of his luxury Bangkok hotel room on Thursday, Thai police said. No signs were found of other people in the room and the body of the 72-year-old actor was sent to a hospital for an autopsy, police said. David Carradine, the lean, laconic star of the 1970s TV series "Kung Fu" and the arch villain of Quentin Tarantino's two-part saga "Kill Bill," was found dead June 4 in a Bangkok hotel room.

A Thailand newspaper, the Nation, reported that a hotel maid found the actor's body. Thai police said he apparently had hanged himself with a curtain cord.

Mr. Carradine, 72, was in Bangkok to shoot his latest film, "Stretch," his manager, Chuck Binder, told the Associated Press.

Although his best-known roles celebrated his martial-arts prowess and his coiled-snake cool, he was a serious actor who appeared in more than 140 movies and worked with directors as varied as Martin Scorsese and Ingmar Bergman. He also was a member of a distinguished acting family, which included his father, John Carradine, who appeared in such movies as "Stagecoach" (1939), "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940) and "The Ten Commandments" (1956). Mr. Carradine's four brothers and two daughters also are actors.

Tarantino once described Mr. Carradine as "one of the great mad geniuses of the acting community," linking him to other "mad genius" actors Jack Nicholson and Christopher Walken. "Mad" was, at times, as apt as "genius," as in 1975 when a nude Carradine ended up in jail after vandalizing a neighbor's house while tripping on peyote.

He played his first leading role, as a Depression-era union organizer, in a 1972 feature film, "Boxcar Bertha," where his director was Scorsese, making his own Hollywood debut. "Boxcar Bertha" co-starred Barbara Hershey, Mr. Carradine's partner at the time and the mother of his son Free (who later changed his name to Tom).

Soon afterward, he was cast in the role that made him a star, playing Kwai Chang Caine in the ABC-TV series "Kung Fu." From 1972 to 1975, Mr. Carradine as Caine, a Chinese American Shaolin monk, wandered barefoot through the American West righting wrongs and quietly dispensing koans of faux-Zen wisdom. He reprised the role in a mid-1980s TV movie and played Caine's grandson in the 1990s syndicated series "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues."

"I am Kung Fu," he told The Washington Post years later. "I mean I'm not [messing] around you know. . . . "I'm really into revolution, but it's the revolution of the body and spirit -- seeking illumination is what I'm doing."

For his role as folk singer and union organizer Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's "Bound for Glory" (1976), he was named Best Actor by the National Board of Review and nominated for a Golden Globe. In "The Serpent's Egg" (1977), he played a Jewish alcoholic circus performer opposite Liv Ullmann in 1920s Germany. Although the movie is widely considered the low point in Bergman's directing career, Mr. Carradine received respectable notices.

He also won acclaim for his role in "The Long Riders" (1980), directed by Walter Hill. Mr. Carradine and his brothers Keith and Robert played the Younger brothers, members of the notorious James gang.

He also appeared in the occasional bomb, particularly in the 1980s when his reputation as a messy, temperamental drunk made him almost unemployable. He said he stopped drinking in 1996.

Alcohol did not always account for the low-quality of Mr. Carradine's projects. A 2008 TV mini-series called "Kung Fu Killer" also was forgettably bad. "Carradine, playing a character alternately called White Crane and the White Crane, brings new meaning to the word 'disheveled,' " Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote. "He looks like the bed got up on the wrong side of him."

He was born John Arthur Carradine in Hollywood on Dec. 8, 1936, the eldest son of John Carradine and Ardanelle Abigail McCool. He studied music theory and composition at what is now San Francisco State University but gravitated toward acting. He made his professional debut with the Theatre of the Golden Hind in Berkeley, dropped out of college and found the occasional role with the Shakespeare Repertory Theatre in San Francisco. He also sold encyclopedias.

Drafted into the Army, he formed an entertainment troupe and produced and starred in musicals, before being court-martialed for shoplifting from a base grocery store. Living in New York after being discharged, he played Laertes to his father's Hamlet at a theater on Long Island. He then signed a contract with Universal Studios and began appearing in small guest roles on television and supporting roles in movies.

He introduced himself to a new generation of movie-goers as the title character in Tarantino's over-the-top revenge epic, "Kill Bill," Volumes 1 and 2. In Vol. 1, released in 2003, he is a menacing voice on the phone; in Vol. 2, released the next year, he is revealed as a ruthless assassin and a doting father. For his performance in Vol. 2, he received a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe.

Mr. Carradine also composed and recorded more than 60 songs and was a painter, sculptor and the author of three books, including his autobiography, "Endless Highway" (1995)

In addition to his six-year relationship with Hershey (also known as Barbara Seagull), he was married to Donna Lee Brecht, Linda Gilbert, Gail Jensen and Coco d'Este. The marriages ended in divorce.

Survivors include his wife of four years, Annie Bierman; four children; and four stepchildren.