The Rich Gone Wild

By David Abel
Globe Staff
01/22/2006

The brick-front palace opens its gates to hoi polloi for two weeks every year.

And when it does, there’s a hint of mayhem in the Back Bay.

So hungry for Helmut Lang jeans and Dries Van Noten sweaters, the prices of which last week struck one especially couture-challenged reporter as either a mistake or bordering on insane, they line up in droves in the cold, sometimes waiting for hours.

When the doors finally open, with some sort of electronica pulsing from the sound system, hundreds of unwashed fashionistas — OK, these commoners aren’t exactly beggars — rush to the racks, some tripping over one another on the hardwood floor.

At 50 percent off, for God’s sake, there are deals to be had!

Of course, at Louis Boston, the word “sale” is all relative. The century-old clothing store on Berkeley Street regularly sells men’s corduroy pants for $495, polo shirts for $295, and shoes that look like they came from a bowling alley for $450.

And that’s the cheap stuff. The price tag on one pily tweed blazer read $3,950.

Yet at the store’s most recent weeklong markdown, which ended last week, the customers seemed like children in a candy store. They couldn’t get enough of it.

A political science researcher at Harvard, Tadashi Yamomota, discovered the biannual sale last summer, after it was too late. He vowed not to miss it again this month, when Louis (pronounced LOO-eez, almost like a certain French royal known as the Sun King) clears out its winter stock for the new season.

Prowling for presents on his second day at the sale — the previous day he dropped $6,000 for a suit, three ties, two shirts, and a pair of socks — the excited 46-year-old scholar from Tokyo plans to spend another $2,000.

“This seems cheap,” he says. “In Japan, it would cost $20,000 — and you get service here.”

Would he wear such extravagant threads on campus, where elbow pads are more de rigueur?

“At Harvard, I stick to `Irish style,’ more poor but pure of mind,” he says, while ogling stacks of the remaining collared dress shirts, which sell for hundreds of dollars, even with the discount. “I prefer to save these Italian clothes for New York, or a night out in Boston.”

Kendra Torode says she has shopped at Louis, a grand building that once housed the old New England Museum of Natural History, since she was 3 years old.

Still tagging along with her mom, the 24-year-old from Acton looks at shorts with a $250 price tag and Prada boots that regularly sell for $550. Her job in public relations (and Mom’s largesse) affords her only so much indulgence, even during the sale.

“I try not to go crazy,” she says, noting the smattering of CDs available for only $10.

Then there’s David Ribak, who says he’s just thankful he didn’t miss the sale, which he was reminded of while reading a newspaper a few days before at a Four Seasons resort in Mexico.

Rifling though silk ties on the last day of the sale, when prices are marked down another 10 percent, the 58-year-old divorce lawyer from Chestnut Hill says he bought his first suit at Louis 35 years ago, and he’s tried to hit every sale since then.

Now he owns two dozen suits, and he’s considering one more. He holds up a chalk-striped Brioni that regularly sells for $3,995. He admires it. “This is a power suit I can wear in court,” he says.

Then he adds, to the chagrin of the store’s top management, who say they don’t want to promote the sale so much that their customers won’t come the rest of the year: “I never would buy this at regular price.”

Reached on her cellphone in a taxi in Milan, Debi Greenberg, who three years ago officially took over the business from her father, explains why her prices aren’t unreasonable: After favorably comparing her merchandise to what she referred to as the middling garments for sale at the Gap, which she suggests has a higher profit margin, she offers this adage: “You get what you pay for.”

Asked why anyone would spend $200 for a T-shirt or $3,000 for a leather jacket, she says: “Most men don’t understand the quality of good clothing.”

The 50-year-old fashion guru offers an analogy. “Some cars are $10,000, some cars are $50,000, and some cars are $100,000,” she says. “The same thing happens with clothes, even with T-shirts.”

Then she really puts it in perspective: “The sale is like getting a Mercedes at half off.”

But it’s over now. The day after the sale ended, last Monday, Louis closes for the day.

After taking what they want for 75 percent off, Greenberg’s employees group the sweaters, jackets, pants — whatever’s left over, or about 7 percent of the winter stock — on racks, where they’re scanned and packed in boxes.

Then they’re sent to Filene’s Basement, which pays Louis a percentage between 75 and 90 percent off the original price, Greenberg says.

The sale lives on there, where hoi polloi shop, at least until the Louis cycle returns in the summer.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

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Powder Keg

By David Abel
Globe Staff
01/22/2006

Around midnight one Saturday in November, as often occurs on weekends in Allston, police fielded complaints about a loud party on Gardner Street, at the former home of Boston University’s Phi Delta Theta fraternity.

Soon after, two officers in street clothes joined a line at the back of the house, where hundreds of college students paid $5 for a plastic cup courtesy of a 20-year-old doorman, according to a police report.

When the officers reached the door, they showed their badges and seized the young man’s wad of cash. Afterward, they cleared some 300 mostly underage students from the house and made two arrests. They found, according to the report, assorted Jell-O shots and five kegs filled with Bud Light.

It may have been a routine call for an area where some 20,000 students live, but police cite something noteworthy about the incident: They traced the kegs to Wollaston Wines & Spirits — in Quincy.

The case exposed a loophole in the city’s latest effort to control student drinking. With little fanfare a few weeks before, and under pressure from the mayor and City Council, the Boston Licensing Board passed a rule requiring liquor stores to give police the name and address of anyone buying a keg of beer — possibly the first such law in the nation.

It didn’t take long for students to learn that getting blitzed by the barrel requires little more than a quick drive to Quincy or Cambridge or a short walk to Brookline or Newton, police say.

“This is how easy it is to avoid the law,” says Captain William B. Evans, who’s in charge of enforcing laws in Allston-Brighton.

In Boston, the unanimously passed keg regulation is just the latest skirmish in the city’s centuries-old battle with booze, one that reaches back to its teetotaling Puritan founders and the Blue Laws banning Sunday alcohol sales, which began in the Colonial era but weren’t wiped off the books until 2004.

The new rules were first proposed a year ago following the Red Sox pennant-victory riots that left Emerson College junior Victoria Snelgrove dead, shot by police with a “nonlethal” crowd-control weapon.

Each year, more than 1,000 college students die and 500,000 are injured nationally as the result of alcohol, according to a 2002 report by the Boston University School of Public Health.

“The goal is that we don’t lose any more lives,” says Councilor Stephen J. Murphy, who proposed the law. “Police found 67 kegs bought that night at liquor stores in Boston that went to houses later identified as off-campus student housing. We wanted to do something about it.”

Officials at the Licensing Board, as well as national and statewide liquor store associations, said they’re unaware of any other city that has adopted such a law.

“Other cities do regulate keg sales, but as far as we know, it’s the only law of its kind where you have to inform the police immediately on the sale of a keg,” says

John Bodnovich, a spokesman for the American Beverage Licensees, which represents 20,000 beer, wine, and liquor stores around the country.

The rules took effect last fall at the finale of another election season, only a few weeks after Mayor Tom Menino had just wangled headlines calling for alcohol-free “entertainment zones” — designated nightspots in places such as Faneuil Hall Marketplace where underage residents could gather to party, sans cocktails.

“We have to get beyond people going to bars and drinking,” Menino had told the Globe in October.

Last January, the city’s police commissioner announced Operation Student Shield, to crack down on public drinking and loud parties. (By year’s end, police had arrested 23 people age 20 or younger for liquor law violations.) Another proposal under consideration would require local universities to assess students $100 per semester to cover policing costs during big sports events. Councilor Murphy says the plan would raise $36 million for the city, but he may shelve the proposal to instead press local universities to add $100 million to their payments to the city.

Party time in student city
Still, loud parties persist and students continue to guzzle alcohol. For many students in the prime target area, Allston-Brighton, the party lives on, particularly now, at the beginning of the semester, with the Super Bowl approaching and schoolwork not yet back in high gear.

Sales of kegs in the neighborhood continue at a steady pace — about 25 a weekend, local police say. But students say they’ve started trading kegs for beer balls, which are about one-third the size, and cases of beer.

In interviews, owners of liquor stores across Allston-Brighton say they’ve seen a modest rise in sales of beer balls since the law took effect in late October. “They buy what they need, even if it’s not a keg,” says George Haivanis, owner of Reservoir Wines & Spirits Inc. in Brighton. “They’re still going to drink. As long as they’re of age and responsible, we don’t mind.”

It’s not clear whether keg sales are up in neighboring communities — owners of liquor stores say they haven’t noticed any significant spike — but police say that even if the new law doesn’t prevent students from buying kegs, the information can be helpful.

“Our goal isn’t to track where every keg goes,” Captain Evans says, noting his officers review each fax from liquor stores. “We’re looking for problem houses, where multiple kegs are going.”

For some students, the police are starting to feel like Big Brother.

The law also requires liquor stores to tell police the number of kegs bought, the time of the sale, and when and where they’re going.

“This is another in a series of attempts to curb student life and regulate any semblance of privacy for students,” says John Guilfoil, 22, a Kappa Sigma fraternity member who serves as executive vice president of Northeastern’s student government.

He cites the city’s effort last year to require campuses to turn over the addresses of all off-campus students, as well as Murphy’s proposal to hike student fees.

“If you’re of age, and you want to have a keg, you’re allowed to do that — and I don’t see why the government needs to know,” says Guilfoil, noting kegs, which hold about 15 gallons of beer, offer a better value for larger parties. “Alcohol is a part of adult life all over the world.”

A toast to Big Brother?
Others describe the new law as government intrusion.

“Don’t the police have anything more important to do?” asks Catie Gavenonis, 24, a law student at Boston University. “It’s like everyone has to have a personal liquor license, and you’re being watched even if you haven’t done anything wrong.”

The Licensing Board’s chairman, Daniel Pokaski, defends the new keg law as a sensible, if flawed, attempt to rein in student drunks, countless numbers of whom have spilled onto the streets in recent years after postseason Patriots and Red Sox victories, starting bonfires, turning over cars, and climbing streetlights.

“We understand the rule is full of loopholes,” he says. “If the kids want to buy cases of beer or jugs of alcohol or booze, they can still do that. But if it works once or twice, then I think it’s effective.”

The law, he argues, doesn’t violate anyone’s rights.

“Alcohol is a highly regulated commodity, like drugs,” he says. “This isn’t like Big Brother; it’s like requiring a permit to buy a gun or a prescription before you buy drugs at a pharmacy.”

A more effective way to reduce student drinking would be to raise taxes on beer or ban two-for-one kinds of sales, says Henry Wechsler, director of the college alcohol studies program at the Harvard School of Public Health. Until state policymakers take action — local ordinances are too easy to avoid — it’s unlikely students will change their drinking habits, he says.

You open it, you drink it up
“There’s a rule that once a container is opened, it’s drained, and the larger the container, the more consumed,” Wechsler says. “So it’s a good idea to reduce access to kegs.”

“But at the same time the city is cracking down, they’re making it easier to drink,” he says, referring to the Licensing Board’s decisions last year to open the streets around Fenway Park to alcohol vendors and allow the Red Sox to build more than a dozen new beer stands inside the park.

“They’re sending mixed signals,” Wechsler says.

Meanwhile, Marty’s Liquors at Commonwealth Avenue and Harvard Avenue has a sign advertising the merchandise: “Marty’s features the largest selection and lowest priced kegs in town.”

Inside, past rows of Jagermeister and tequila, behind another sign advising customers to “Remember: Ice, Cups, and Party Supplies!”, stacks of freshly filled kegs cool in a large refrigerator. There are 30 types of kegs for sale, ranging from Keystone for $39.99 to Guinness Stout for $144.99. The most popular, selling for $47.99, is Bud Light.

Like other liquor store owners interviewed, Marty Siegal says he has no problem with the new law, which hasn’t had a noticeable effect on his bottom line.
If the city banned keg sales, he says, he wouldn’t mind. Given their small profit margin, he says, he could easily do without the large, space-hogging barrels.

“We’re in the service business,” he says. “We only sell them because people want to buy them.”

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com

SIDEBAR: GOING WITH THE FLOW

The cheaper the drink, the stronger the draw to overdo.

A keg of Bud Light costing $47.99 ** holds 165 12-ounce servings, at a cost of about 29 cents per drink

A beer ball of Bud Light costing $28.99 holds 55 12-ounce servings, at a cost of about 53 cents per beer

A case of Bud Light costing $19.99 holds 24 12-ounce servings, at a cost of about 83 cents per beer

Boston police report sales of kegs in the Allston-Brighton neighborhood are holding steady at about 25 kegs per weekend. But some students say they’ve started trading kegs for cases and beer balls, which are not required to be reported to police

Sidebar:
FILL ‘ER UP, SIR? AND PERHAPS YOURSELF, TOO?

By David Abel
Globe Staff
01/22/2006

The potpourri of products for sale include beef jerky, lottery tickets, ice cream, and condoms.

The typical stuff stocked in gas station minimarts.

At the Shell station between Andrew Square and South Bay, a yellow sign near the pumps advertises a few things unavailable at any of the other 122 gas stations in Boston: “Liquor, Beer, Wine.”

The 35-year-old former ARCO just west of the Southeast Expressway is the only city gas station licensed to sell alcohol, says Daniel Pokaski, chairman of the Boston Licensing Board, who fought the station’s initial application for a liquor license in the 1970s.

And they sell it all, everything from expensive Kendall Jackson wine to big cans of Japan-brewed Sapporo beer to scores of 50-milliliter nips filled with whiskey, rum, tequila, brandy, gin, vodka, and more.

The board granted the license in 1979 to Value Liquors, a separate company formed by Christopher Azizian, the station’s owner, according to a copy of the license. The station has renewed its license every year since then, even though the board twice cited the place for selling alcohol to minors and once for selling to an intoxicated customer.

“We’ve never granted another,” Pokaski says. “I think it sends the wrong message. When you’re picking up gas, and getting a six-pack, I just think the nexus is too close between drinking and driving.”

Azizian and other gas station owners argue the ban against gas stations selling alcohol is unfair, particularly when supermarkets now sell gas and other service stations throughout the state sell liquor.

“What’s the difference if it’s a gas station or a food store?” Azizian says. “What about package stores in the neighborhood next to a gas station?”

Paul O’Connell, executive director of the New England Service Station and Automotive Repair Association in Billerica, says he would be surprised if the ban existed anywhere but Boston, which for centuries has strictly regulated alcohol sales.

Today, however, about 1,200 corner stores, restaurants, and bars including the Shell station are licensed to sell alcohol in Boston, according to the Licensing Board. “It doesn’t make sense,” O’Connell says. “You can go to almost any corner store in the Commonwealth to buy liquor.”

A spokesman for AAA Southern New England says he has seen no evidence linking drunken driving with alcohol sales at service stations. “A lot of gas stations have liquor stores right next to them, and it seems unfair to me that a gas retailer is wrong to sell liquor if a Stop & Shop can do it,” says Art Kinsman.

“Driving is pretty much the way it gets transported anywhere.”

On a recent morning at the Shell station, a steady flow of customers stop in for everything from six-packs of Bud Light to small bottles of vodka.

“It happens to be on my way home,” says Sean Lewton, 44, of Carver, who takes a six-pack.

Just off work loading supplies at Home Depot, Carlos Diaz and a few buddies walk over for an end-of-the shift celebration. They buy three 40-ounce bottles of Busch, which sell for $2.15 each. “At least we’re not driving,” says Diaz, 45, of Chelsea.

Business may seem strong at the Shell minimart, but it’s down about 80 percent in recent years, Azizian and his manager Tatoul Badalian say.

A decade ago, the Big Dig closed the expressway exit next to their station, which cut business dramatically.

A year ago, construction workers moved the entrance to the expressway, cutting traffic even more.

In the summer, the busiest time of the year for alcohol sales, the station used to sell as many as 100 cases of beer a day; now, it moves maybe six or seven, says Badalian, who has worked for Azizian for 25 years.

“We’re just a little dinky store now,” Badalian says.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

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The Mayor of Mozart Park

By David Abel
Globe Staff
May 20, 2007

The man in the black hat and plastic gloves has the kind of toothy grin of a mayor milling about his constituents.

Over the past 17 years, Manuel “Madego” Debrand has built a loyal following, slapping backs and kissing babies. But instead of a red tie, he wears a red apron; instead of patronage, he dispenses plastic cups of flavored ices, deep-fried pastelitos, and a helping of avuncular wisdom.

Still, the 58-year-old from the Dominican Republic, who heralds the end of winter by wheeling an old cart out of his red- and white-striped van to a corner of Mozart Park, curries a certain influence as one of the few licensed street vendors in Jamaica Plain.

“They call me the eyes and ears of the neighborhood,” he says in a Spanish that echoes the Dominican accent of nearly all of his clients.

As he pours tamarind syrup over shaved ices and pulls pastelitos from a vat of sizzling oil, Debrand urges kids not to skip school, alerts police and park officials to problems, and kibitzes with anyone who stops by for his $1 treats.
With the steady beat of salsa and bachata pulsing from his boom box, he also transforms what might be an otherwise sleepy corner into a daily fiesta.
This year, however, the party may not carry into the summer.

Next month, the city will begin a $515,000 renovation of Mozart Park, leaving Debrand with little if any room to operate.

“It won’t make sense for him to be there with the area under construction,” said Mary Hines, a spokeswoman for the Boston Parks and Recreation Department, one of several authorities that have issued Debrand a license to sell food in Mozart Park. “I just don’t know how he’s going to do business; there won’t be much room for his clients.”

Hines said construction crews will decide whether it’s safe for him to operate while they replace concrete with granite cobblestones and install new planters. But she said the city hopes he can stay.

“He’s invaluable to us: It’s like having our own park partner there every day,” Hines said. “Everyone thinks he’s a great guy. He’s the first to call if there’s anything going on that shouldn’t, or if there’s something that needs to be repaired.”

In addition to the parks department, Debrand has permits to sell from Boston’s Inspectional Services Department — which regulates 225 street vendors in the city — and the state Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation. None has any record of a complaint or violation against Madego’s, an acronym he said stands for “Made to Go.”

Debrand isn’t complaining about the renovations that might blunt his business.

“What’s good for the community benefits me,” he said. “I’m not worried.”

Debrand starts his days in Chelsea, where he and his wife have a small restaurant they call Madego’s The Great Kitchen.

She helps prepare the pastelitos, cutting the dough, stuffing it with cheese, chicken, or meat, and folding them into turnovers, trays full of them, which they pack into coolers.

They load other coolers with cans of soda and bottled water, chunks of ice for the snow-cone machine, and reserves of corn oil, which Debrand stacks in the back of the pickup truck he takes to JP.

After winter ends, if the weather’s nice, he opens nearly every day.
When he arrives at around noon, Madego’s is like an ice cream truck at the beach, the salsa and bachata his bell.

Within minutes of opening his green umbrella and switching on the music, there’s a line, a steady flow of customers that doesn’t ebb until he leaves around dusk.

He won’t say how much he earns in a day, but he’s proud of not raising his prices — nearly everything he sells costs a $1 — since he began coming to Mozart Park.

“Life can be tough, but everyone has a dollar,” he said.

He greets those who come for lunch or dinner with “mi vida” (my life), “mi cielo” (my sky), or “mi amor” (my love).

“He’s like an uncle,” said Juan Fernandez, who owns a nearby barbershop and said Debrand has served him nearly every day for years.

Gladys Rivera, who regularly brings her children to Madego’s, said she wouldn’t know what to do without him. “He’s a part of the family.”

Francisco Lizardo, a vice consul from the Dominican Republic who works at the consulate in Boston, said Debrand is a hub for the Dominican community.

“He really is like the mayor of Jamaica Plain,” said Lizardo, who also regularly eats at Madego’s. “He brings a piece of Santo Domingo here.”

If there’s a downside to the business, it’s all the garbage that litters the neighborhood by the end of the day. But city officials work with Debrand.

On a recent afternoon, Moises Watson, a city worker who helps keep the park clean, gave Debrand several trash bags.

“We need more Madego’s,” he said. “He doesn’t just look after the area; he helps keep the kids straight and sets a good example for them — that if you work hard, you can succeed.”

But Debrand said he doesn’t see what he does as work.

With cars passing on Centre Street beeping their horns for Debrand and others parking in a nearby bus stop to grab a snow cone or pastelito, Debrand moves quickly, joking and laughing and offering his opinions while making change.

“This isn’t work,” he said. “This is a pleasure.”

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

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The Duke Walks The Walk

By David Abel
Globe Staff
5/11/2003

There, at the edge of the grassy field, it glints in the morning sun, beckoning the well-dressed man with the furry eyebrows. It mars his way to work. To him, it’s an egregious sight in an otherwise pristine part of the park.

At 69, he doesn’t move as fast as he used to, but he won’t let this one get away, no matter what the muddy grounds may do to his penny loafers. With a canvas Amtrak bag in one hand and a fistful of garbage in the other, the son of Greek immigrants darts toward the purple candy wrapper, chasing after it as a sudden breeze lifts it just beyond his reach.

“I mean, look at this crap!” he growls, finally snaring the offensive refuse. “It’s appalling, disgraceful. There’s just no excuse for it.”

It might strike some as laughable that a man who once ran for president and held the highest office in Massachusetts now spends his morning commute indignantly collecting other people’s trash and cursing a decade’s worth of politicians and bureaucrats.

But for former Governor Michael Dukakis nothing has changed: When you leave office, he says, you don’t stop caring.

There are many issues the former governor gets passionate about – teaching, high-speed rail – but this morning, it’s all about litter.

“It’s enough to drive you out of your mind,” he says. “You see it all over the place and you have to ask: Why isn’t anyone dealing with this?”

The governor has met with his successors about it. He has harangued officials at the Metropolitan District Commission, which preserves parks in the Boston area, as well as local park administrators.

Frustrated with government excuses about budget cuts and bureaucratic delays, Dukakis tries to lead by example — every weekday he’s around when it’s not raining or snowing.

At 7:30, two hours after rising, ripping through two newspapers and devouring slices of his own homemade bread, he sets off from his Brookline home for Northeastern University, where he has been teaching government for a decade. If he doesn’t take a bag with him, he either finds one along the way or just collects what he can hold until finding a trashcan.

On a recent morning, dressed in a jacket and tie for a conference featuring the current governor, it takes only a few paces past his driveway for him to barehand an old, soggy newspaper, a used tissue, and a leaky styrofoam cup. The stench doesn’t faze him.

“This is nothing,” he says.

Down a stairwell and trotting the banks of the Muddy River, he points to reeds and junk waiting to be dredged. “I left a plan for [former Governor William] Weld 13 years ago to do this, and only now are we getting to it,” he fumes.

As people pass, some smile but many don’t seem to recognize him. If they’re younger than 25 years old, he says, it’s likely he’s a nobody to them.

Seeing the governor gather trash, Dukakis says one man recently told him: “We had higher aspirations for you once.”

But picking up trash is what it’s all about — doing what you can, he says. Of course, that doesn’t mean he can’t complain. Upon seeing graffiti scrawled on a mailbox, he carps: “Who is this idiot? What is this? What kind of gratification do they get from this kind of thing?”

Then there are the leftover encampments from people who have burrowed homes in wooded areas along the way. Seeing all the mangy blankets, old clothes, and cracked bottles in dense piles riles the governor.

He would clean it up, he says, but sometimes there’s too much stuff for one person. It would take a truck, he says, adding that the Metropolitan District Commission is not doing its job. Then he points to a bag sitting next to a bench in the Fenway. Filled with sludge he gathered two weeks ago, he says it hasn’t moved since.

More proof: a collection of bottles and cans in one swampy section of the Muddy River. It’s where Dukakis draws the line. “I don’t go into the water,” he says. “Someone else has to do that.”

Closer to Northeastern in Clemente Park, he sees a sign of hope: a man raking. As if still campaigning, he walks toward the worker and in his signature baritone says: “Mike Dukakis, how are ya?”

Gerard Recupero smiles and identifies himself. “Sure I recognize you,” he says. “Good to see you, Mr. Dukakis.”

The two chat about litter for a minute, but Dukakis has to go. There’s more trash to pick up, and he’s running late.

An hour after he started, the two-mile journey ends at Northeastern’s Meserve Hall. He finds a receptacle and drops in his last pile of trash — a stuffed plastic bag. All done without a smudge on his navy blazer. His perfectly combed hair hasn’t budged during the commute.

Before taking off for his morning class, he parries questions about whether he’s depressed by the way things have turned out. Politically, he says: “This is the worst national administration I’ve lived under.” A conservative Republican also now holds his old job. And, recently, in the course of a week, he lost his mother and father-in-law.

Yet with teaching going well, calls each day from people interested in hearing him speak, and four grandchildren, he insists: “I feel like a million bucks.”

For the city’s necklace of parks, however, he says things are coming apart. “There’s just too much neglect,” he says. “Things are worse than when I was governor.”

So these days, in the evening, if the weather’s right, he may be back out there, picking trash on his way home.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

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Balancing atop Bunker Hill

Restoring the crumbling Bunker Hill monument takes more than granite. (Click her for a slideshow.)

By David Abel
Globe Staff
6/11/2006

At 200 feet above the city, with briny winds howling off the harbor, Russ Burtt crawls out a small window and plops on a thin plank of plywood — outside the granite pyramid atop the Bunker Hill Monument.

It’s how the specially trained mason now starts a typical day at work.

“It’s not bad, so long as you can stand the heights,” says Burtt, 43, who ambles around the “crow’s nest,” a flimsy looking array of steel cables, brackets, and wood, sans any sign of vertigo.

The sunburned restoration specialist leads a four-man crew that’s part of a $3.7 million project to renovate the 163-year-old obelisk and surrounding area. The job, which began last month and is scheduled to end next year, includes new lighting, improved wheelchair ramps, and a new museum in the old city library across the street. The monument could reopen as soon as September.

Some of the work is routine, but Burtt’s sky-high tasks require special skills –beyond stomaching long views to the ground — and immediate attention. For the first time in 25 years, the crew is “repointing” the monument, replacing much of the mortar that helps keep its massive granite blocks in place.

“We need to do this now because we’ve found moisture [in the mortar and granite] that has led to cracks that can stress the structure to failure,” says Doug Ford, the project’s quality control manager. “It’s inconvenient to do it now, but summer’s the best time to grout the masonry.”

Burtt’s men have already found 20 pieces of loose granite — some the size of bricks — that were in danger of falling. There are likely more, but the National Park Service only has enough money to repoint the north and east sides, which face prevailing winds and are more weathered than the other sides.

The lack of cash is an old story at the monument. A series of financial shortfalls delayed the monument’s completion until 1843 — 18 years after construction began. (In total, it took $156,218.14 to build the monument, according to the National Park Service, nearly all from private donations, save $7,000 from the Commonwealth.)

Burtt has recommended that the park service figure out a way to repair all four sides now. To put off repairing any of the sides, he says, would be significantly more expensive — and potentially dangerous.

“There’s definitely the possibility that some pieces could fall from the other sides,” Burtt says.

From what he can see of the south and west walls — the ones he’s not working on — they appear to have a similar number of loose pieces of granite, which are between roughly 2 by 2 inches and 4 by 4 inches. “I’d say there’s surely some liability there. We’re aware of it, so I think it should be addressed.”

National Park Service officials overseeing the construction say they’ll review any findings that could endanger the 170,000 or so people each year who visit the monument, the nation’s first major memorial to commemorate the Revolutionary War. (The Washington Monument, more than 300 feet taller, wasn’t completed until 1885.)

“We don’t want to leave the monument in an unsafe condition,” says Ruth Raphael, a planner at the National Park Service, which maintains the monument. “If it’s a safety issue, we’ll have to look at what’s involved. But we need to know what we’re talking about pricewise.”

According to the National Park Service, the total cost of the monument repair work is $314,300, which includes: $60,000 to build scaffolding atop the monument; $155,000 to repoint the exterior; $33,000 to repair exterior masonry; $66,300 for all other work to rehabilitate the monument.

One reason it’s cheaper to do the repairs now, says Burtt — whose Connecticut-based Joseph Gnazzo Co. would profit from the additional work — is the crow’s nest, a treehouse-like contraption that somehow supports 30 tons and can withstand winds up to about 50 knots. His crew’s work depends on its intricately designed scaffolding, which they would have to rebuild to renovate the rest of the monument in the future.

To assemble such a sturdy platform atop the 221-foot-high obelisk — a task akin to balancing a large object on the head of a pin — took a week’s worth of brawn and smarts. It also had to be done delicately enough to avoid scarring the monument’s smooth stones.

The careful labor started last month when Burtt and his men climbed the monument’s spiraling 294 steps, hauling heavy steel cables and other equipment to the observation deck.

There, they removed the monument’s old, weathered glass windows and dropped four long ropes to the ground, where one of the men tied the ropes together in square knots, linking the windows.

Completing the crow’s nest was like a ballet in work boots and hardhats: The men pulled up the ropes, tied them to a five-eighths-inch-thick steel cable, and threaded it around the 15 square feet at the top of the monument, until it reached all the way around. They set corner brackets on three sides of the monument and, using turnbuckles and fist grips, tightened the cable — the scaffolding’s spine — until it was taut, reaching 130 pounds per foot of pressure.

The next step required poles to position large, load-bearing brackets, which they secured to the cable and attached, through additional 200-foot cables, to a 600-pound “electric swing.”

With the mobile scaffolding, the men brought up more cables, two dozen brackets, a mesh fence, and 20 planks of OSHA-approved plywood, all of which they hammered and stitched together to create two well-ventilated floors, connected by a ladder.

“It’s a step-by-step process,” Burtt says. “You start smaller and get bigger.”

With the scaffolding complete, the men got to work, using diamond-blade saws to remove as much of the old mortar as possible from the monument’s two sides.

Moving up and down on the electric swing, the men are now using tools called trowels and hawks to fill the joints with mortar, made from a special solution of lime and sand that Burtt says should last 100 years.

The rest of the work involves pressure washing both sides of the monument, to remove several decades-worth of carbon buildup, and repairing the loose granite with what they call dutchmen. The men cut the replacement stones to fit exactly where they removed the loose granite. Then they attach them with stainless steel pins and seal them with epoxy.

“The goal is to preserve the historic look,” says Burtt, whose crew recently completed similar work on the Bennington Monument, a 306-foot obelisk in Vermont. “We don’t want it to look shiny or new.”

Stepping off the electric swing, which supports three men and takes about 10 minutes to reach the top, James Lemanski is covered in dust, his safety harness and hard hat barely visible in a cloud of fine soot raining down.

Carrying a 5-gallon bucket of mortar, the 27-year-old mason says he’s proud to be part of the team restoring the towering memorial to the bloody battle there on June 17, 1775.

As for the heights?

“You get used to it,” he says.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

SIDEBAR:
THE STARTING POINT
Construction on the obelisk began in 1825, but work lurched along as funds were depleted, then cobbled together. To get the job done, the Bunker Hill Association in 1838 began selling off 10 acres of the battlefield as house lots, eventually hanging onto only the summit of Breed’s Hill for use as monument grounds. Josepha Hale, editor of Ladies’ Magazine, banded together with other women to hold a sale of crafts and baked goods, racking up $30,000 over a two-week run that fi lled the rotunda of Quincy Market. Now, 168 years later, Bunker Hill is in need of a monumental rehab.

To mix replacement mortar, construction will use: 8,000 lbs. hydrated lime, 14,000 lbs. sand, and 1,600 lbs. water.
Total weight of new mortar is 12 tons, a volume of 3,000 gallons.
Total linear footage of horizontal and vertical joints on monument is 11,500, or 2.3 miles, of which 1.2 miles will be replaced.
Tradesmen and inspectors will climb up and down the 221-foot-tall monument twice per day for four months, totalling 120 miles.
Energy required to lift mortar up monument stairs over project life could exceed a billion foot-pounds.

SOURCE: National Park Service

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For Coaches, Real-Life Losses

By David Abel
Globe Staff
May 18, 2007

When Roosevelt Robinson and Dennis Wilson learned that Jerome Wells had been shot to death, they realized he was the third former quarterback they had lost to violence since they began coaching football at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School in Roxbury .

One was found floating in the Charles River. Another was shot to death at a Dorchester party trying to help a girl who had a necklace stolen. And Wells, 20, was shot Tuesday night on a Roxbury street, standing next to his seven-months pregnant girl friend.

“I do more funerals than graduations or proms,” Robinson said. “It’s just very sad.”

In their front-row seat to Boston’s street violence, they have helped bury dozens of former players, athletes they tried to recruit, or other students they have known.

“It’s very devastating, very dishearten ing, very depressing, and very scary,” Wilson said. “And it’s getting worse, not getting better. It seems like every day another kid is dying. It’s mind-boggling. How’s it going to stop? When’s it going to stop? When are they going to learn the value of a life? It’s just really crazy.”

Over the years, the duo — Robinson, 42, has been the team’s head coach since 1992 and Wilson, 56, the assistant coach since 1981 — have struggled to keep their players from falling victim to the violence all around them.

They said yesterday that they have taken their players for meals and to the movies and, when necessary, given them money and jobs. For some, they have stood in as surrogate fathers.

They said they have tried to teach from their experience, that life presents trapdoors, and that a young man needs to know who he is and what he wants from life to avoid getting sucked in by the drugs, the thugs, the evils that have consumed too many of their peers.

There have been successes, but the failures have been catastrophic. Some found the streets more alluring than their coaches’ words.

“We don’t just teach kids football and basketball; we teach them how to be men, how to make good decisions that may not be fun but are the right decisions,” said Wilson, who is also the school’s basketball coach and teaches history. “But too often they get drawn into the bad things.”

As of yesterday, 22 people have been homicide victims in the city this year, one more than at the same time last year. All but one victim was younger than 30, and all but two were men. Last year the city had 74 homicides, one less than the total in 2005, which hit a 10-year high.

Robinson and Wilson remember Simba Sharif , a foster-care child who played quarterback for Madison Park in the 1980s and turned up dead in the Charles River several years later.

Errol Morrison , another quarterback, was shot in the back of the head on Norwell Street in Dorchester in 1995 after trying to protect a woman, they said.
Other former Madison Park students they have mourned include Lloyd Industrious , a basketball player killed in 1994; Earl Pate , a basketball player stabbed to death in the early 1990s; and Cedrick Steele , 18, who was struck and killed by six bullets in March after walking into his uncle’s barbershop on Dudley Street.

The problem, they say, is a lack of respect for others.

When Robinson played football for Dorchester High School in the late 1970s, he said, there were drugs and violence, but the culture was different. “Today, there’s no respect at all for parents, teachers, coaches. Too many of these kids cuss and swear at you, and they don’t think anything about it,” said Robinson, who is also a firefighter.

So Robinson and Wilson said they try to make their players see the value of life, the opportunity to make something of themselves. “I ask them: Why would you kill someone for $50? I tell them, ‘You can’t replace a life.’ “

One student who appreciated their influence is Miguel Lacourt , now 22, a linebacker who graduated in 2003 after helping lead Madison Park to a state championship. He saw fellow students die.

“Some people just can’t think that will happen to them,” he said in a telephone interview. “I thought, ‘Wow, that could have been me.’ “

Chuck McAfee , the headmaster of Madison Park, called Robinson and Wilson “true role models who are in a constant battle to keep their players on the straight and narrow.”

“They’re always trying to steer them from that negative element, trying to pull them in a different direction,” he said.

That lure apparently caught Wells, a former all-city quarterback at Madison Park who had run-ins with the law and had been shot once before. Two young men were arrested within hours of his slaying; the motive remains unclear.
Robinson and Wilson first met Wells years ago, when they coached him on the Pop Warner Roxbury Raiders and the Mighty Mights .

Arlisa Bennett , Wells’s mother, said the coaches did their best to look out for her son, who she said was studying to be an electrician.

“If Jerome got into anything, Coach Robinson was right there,” she said in an interview at her home in Roxbury. “Coach Robinson would come to my house and really let Jerome have it. And I mean he would make Jerome get out there and do extra runs.”

She said she didn’t have to call Robinson to ask for help — he usually called her. But when she did reach out, Robinson was there.

“I had his number on speed dial,” she said. “I would call up Coach Robinson and say, ‘You know what? This boy is over here hanging out,’ or something, and he’d be right over.”

The Rev. Miniard Culpepper , who ministered to Wells at his Dorchester church, said he, Robinson, and Wilson tried to persuade Wells to use his football talent to get into college.

“We wanted to compare notes on Jerome,” he said. “Everything was about Jerome going. . . . It was a way out. It would have been a way out.”

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

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Trials of Tourism

By David Abel
Globe Staff
6/18/2006

The job requires a willingness to brave freak acts of nature like monsoons, fend off pickpockets and other potential miscreants, and stomach the solitude of traveling alone for two months, often in a foreign country, with no more than a dim grasp of the language.

Candidates should expect to bunk in dingy hostels, sample the local cuisine, whether it be cow hearts sprinkled with salt or stir-fried dog, and pay the digestive consequences – all while taking copious notes at countless guesthouses, restaurants, museums, and nightspots.

Oh, and depending on the country, hires must survive on roughly $50 a day.

Sound like torture?

To Ross Arbes(cq) and generations of Harvard students, the highly competitive positions are about as close to Shangri-la as a summer job can get.

“It’s definitely in the awesome category,’’ says Arbes, 20, a soon-to-be junior now exploring Vietnam. ‘‘Last summer, I was an intern sitting in a cubicle. Now I’m going to be near tropical beaches and shopping in foreign markets.’’

Last week, the English major began a unique opportunity offered to a select, hopefully hardy crew of Harvard students – that is, a job that pays them to travel and publish their journal musings. As part of an annual summer tradition, about 80 newly trained field researchers shipped off this month to five continents to update 15 of the popular Let’s Go Inc. budget travel guides, which Harvard students have produced since 1960.

To qualify, Arbes had to distinguish himself during a battery of interviews from hundreds of similarly bright students who filed into their grungy offices just across from The Harvard Lampoon on Mount Auburn Street. The 14 editors at Let’s Go – which only employs Harvard students – sought out those who wouldn’t go wobbly in less than five-star conditions.

To land a spot as one of five researchers for the 2007 edition of “Let’s Go: Vietnam,’’ Arbes had to impress Julie Vodhanel(cq), 19, who just finished her freshman year and serves as editor of the book’s second edition. He had to prove that not only could he manage to live on just $49 a day, which she insists is a relatively generous stipend for Vietnam, but that he would be ‘‘gung-ho’’ to do the work. Meaning he wouldn’t fail to file the weekly dispatches to Vodhanel, who like Arbes had never been to Vietnam.

‘‘We didn’t hire people who thought they were getting a free vacation,’’ says Vodhanel, who alone interviewed about 80 students interested in researching Vietnam. ‘‘We expect he’ll work as hard as we need him to, and probably harder.’’

Arbes joined Let’s Go at a time when the top brass has decided the travel guides – which face increasingly stiff competition – should return to their roots, a core audience which they describe as “the young and the young-at-heart” who want to explore the world with an irreverent companion that won’t burst their budgets.

Before 9/11, Let’s Go, a for-profit company owned by the nonprofit Harvard Student Agencies, was sending some 200 researcher-writers every summer to update more than 60 titles that covered 70 countries and 18 major cities around the world.

But as the attacks triggered a slump in the travel industry, and with the rise of competition – ‘‘Rough Guides’’ now publishes some 200 titles covering similar territory and ‘‘Lonely Planet’’ prints about 600 titles that offer budget travel tips – Let’s Go felt pressure to try to broaden its audience. Their publisher, St. Martin’s Press in New York City, urged more safety advisories and higher-priced listings, which translated into new items such as ‘‘The Big Splurge’’ and hotel recommendations that sought to appeal to young professionals.

The strategy hasn’t necessarily paid off; the general manager of Harvard Student Agencies says Let’s Go now sells some 500,000 books a year, down from about a million books a year in the late 1990s. Overall, in royalties and advertising, he says the books generate about $2 million in revenue for Harvard. Let’s Go’s website, which now gets about 5 million hits a month, still takes in less than $20,000 a year.

One sign of the guides’ hard times, editors and managers noted, was the publisher’s decision this year to try to boost sales by dropping the price of “Let’s Go: Europe,” the company’s best-selling book, from $24.99 to $14.99. (More than 130,000 copies of the 2006 edition have already sold this year, double the number from last year, according to St. Martin’s Press.) Also, with about half the field researchers on staff than as recently as five years ago, Let’s Go now updates fewer books.

“We’re a student-run operation – we can’t compete with ‘Lonely Planet,’” says Bob Rombauer(cq), the general manager of Harvard Student Agencies. “So we’ve tried to narrow our focus in recent years.”

To do that, Let’s Go decided to junk its “sophisticated” covers for more “colorful” covers. This year’s “Let’s Go: Europe,” for example, scrapped the striking yet obscure image on last year’s cover. Instead of a sculpted face peering out of a field of sunflowers, the 2006 edition features a collage of easily identifiable icons, such as the Eiffel Tower and Dutch clogs.

“We saw the 2005 cover as a pretty picture that wasn’t appealing to those in our age group,” says Laura Martin(cq), 23, a recently graduated senior who’s now Let’s Go’s editor in chief. “We wanted our audience to easily identify us.”

The more substantive changes involve reasserting Let’s Go’s cheeky tone, which she says editors muffled to some extent in recent years to cater to the broader audience. The difference, she says, is they’re encouraging writers to forgo neutral descriptions for more saucy or “honest” language, the kind they say college students value.

So Arbes and the rest of this year’s crew will reassert Let’s Go’s cheeky tone, which she says editors muffled to some extent in recent years to cater to the broader audience.

In previous editions of “Let’s Go: New Zealand,” for example, she says a writer described a “quaint” town and objectively listed its various sights. In the latest edition, Martin says the writer describes the town as more of a place for “grandmothers,” somewhere not worth visiting to really experience New Zealand.

‘‘We were being too cautious,’’ she says. ‘‘We want to bring the vigor back to the books.’’

For Arbes and the other researchers recently hired, one of the first tasks is learning about libel law. Let’s Go has been sued by businesses miffed about the way writers described them. In one case settled in 1998, it took eight years and a Supreme Judicial Court ruling to throw out a lawsuit by an Israeli who claimed Let’s Go unfairly besmirched his youth hostel by telling travelers he had been sued for sexual harassment.

Writers are taught to document their opinions. If they find a place dirty, they must provide details. If they come across a cockroach, they should note the time and place. ‘‘Telling the truth is very important,’’ Martin says. ‘‘But we have to back it up.’’

They also go through “model mugging” classes, and women, who have long made up about half of Let’s Go researchers, learn ways to avoid leering men. Among the tips passed along, women are told to wear fake wedding rings, and if necessary, lie about meeting a husband or boyfriend to men whose attention they don’t want.

Last summer, while traveling as a researcher in Poland, Stephanie O’Rourke(cq) was walking near the Warsaw Ghetto around noon when she says two men cornered her and grabbed her bag. At 18 and just finished with her freshman year, she used what she learned in the mugging seminars before leaving: She elbowed one of the men in the groin and screamed ‘‘help’’ and ‘‘getaway’’ in Polish.

‘‘I’m not very athletic, but it worked,’’ says O’Rourke, who’s now the editor of ‘‘Let’s Go: Germany’’ and oversees six researchers and an associate editor.

The harrowing experience wasn’t the hardest part of her trip; more challenging was just being alone.

‘‘I went days without talking to people in English,’’ she said. ‘‘I spent bus rides just formulating phrases.’’

The sometimes cruel serendipity of living on the road taught her coping mechanisms, such as diligently washing her tired feet every night, splurging on decadent desserts as often as possible, and always getting at least eight hours of sleep.

Amber Johnson had similar experiences while working as a researcher last summer in London. By the end of her route, the 26-year-old graduate student also felt the pangs of loneliness.

‘‘You kind of stand out having dinner by yourself in a romantic place,’’ she says.

So she learned to befriend strangers, and she discovered the joy of finding free stuff — like museums — and nearly free stuff, like cheap opera seats. She also found that as much fun as she had researching, it was real work.

‘‘It can be really exhausting being a fulltime tourist,’’ says Johnson, whose assignment this summer – about 15 percent of researchers do the job more than once – is to figure out how to survive in New York City on just $93 a day.

The fatigue comes from the requirement to move around a lot, but Let’s Go advises their researchers to avoid night transportation, especially night buses.

The warning has been a priority since 2001, when Haley Surti(cq) became Let’s Go’s first researcher who didn’t return from an assignment. The 21-year-old biochemistry major died when a night bus she took in Peru plunged off a mountain road.

No. 1 on a list of safety tips that Let’s Go gives researchers reads: ‘‘Never, ever take night transportation. Ever.’’

But for researchers like Arbes, whose itinerary has him taking a 24-hour bus ride the day after landing in Ho Chi Minh City, there’s often no other choice. ‘‘It’s the only way to go,’’ he says.

As the skinny student from Atlanta loaded his sturdy green backpack last week, he carefully follows Let’s Go’s packing instructions.

He wraps duct tape around a Nalgene bottle, in which he stuffed socks, waterproofs his backpack by lining it with a garbage bag, and packs, among other things, a pillowcase to cover potentially dirty hostel pillows, a loud alarm clock, and a deck of cards to play solitaire.

In addition to a laptop, an iPod, and a medical kit filled with malaria pills a pack of Starbursts, he sets out five boxer shorts, two pairs of khaki pants, a thin fleece, and one button-down shirt.

Then he organizes the seven folders that contain all the maps and CDs he has to update and mail to Cambridge throughout the summer.

Researchers have regular weekly call-in times with their editors and must send ‘‘copy batches’’ just about every week. (Those who don’t risk having their stipends cut off.) The editors spend the summer massaging the text, and in the early fall, they send the manuscripts to St. Martin’s Press, which around Thanksgiving will print 15 of Let’s Go’s current 48 titles.

The day before leaving, and still unsure how to say ‘‘thank you’’ in Vietnamese, Arbes says he has no illusions about the hard work.

‘‘It’s easy to romanticize this, but it’s an intense job,’’ he says.

His only real concern, he says, is getting sick and being far from a hospital.

‘‘But to be honest,’’ he says, ‘‘I’m not too worried.’’

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

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Vignettes

By David Abel
Globe Staff
04/23/2006

Wizened men stroked their long beards. Gray-haired women in berets nodded along to the beat of his reedy voice. Bright-eyed students hung on his every word.

With more than a few turtlenecks and shaggy sweaters in the crowd, it was a quintessentially Cambridge moment, a kind of Memorial Drive of the mind.

One of the last legends of the Beat Generation, Lawrence Ferlinghetti left his enclave in North Beach, San Francisco, last week to accept the New England Poetry Club’s Golden Rose, which club officials say is the nation’s oldest literary prize.

As the balding, 87-year-old New York native gingerly made his way to a podium at Harvard’s Yenching Library to receive the honor previously awarded to masters such as Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, and Czeslaw Milosz, he received a standing ovation.

He put on thick, red glasses and began reading from his oeuvre, decades-old poems from books such as “A Coney Island of the Mind” and “A Far Rockaway of the Heart.”

Lines such as, “I feel there’s an angel in me . . . whom I’m constantly shocking,” got as many laughs and nods as his quips about the “monster corporate monoculture.”

In an interview, Ferlinghetti spoke about the difference between San Francisco and Boston, similarly sized cities with liberal politics, distinct neighborhoods, and a history shaped by oceans.

“People here are more courteous and crotchety,” he said. “It may be a liberal city, but it’s much more traditional than San Francisco. Old forms, mannerisms, and conventions persist here in a way they don’t on the West Coast.”

But Boston has changed, to his chagrin. The buildings have grown. The accent is no longer uniformly “R”-challenged. And the Harvard Square Bickford’s, where he wrote one of his poems long ago, is gone.

“Boston has grown so enormously,” he said, “I hardly recognize it anymore.”

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

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Axing Escort Ads

It’s no morals case

By David Abel
Globe Staff
05/21/2006

Why would a young and puckish alternative weekly, which has yet to show a profit and until recently paid some of its writers in beer and gift certificates to burrito joints, cut some $200,000 in annual revenue — a sum that rivals the pay of its entire editorial staff?

It’s not for moral reasons — that is, any concern they might be profiting off prostitution, its president and publisher say.

Nor, they say, is it the result of an FBI investigation last month into child pornography, or pressure from its parent company, which unsuccessfully sought to move the staff from the cramped space it now occupies in an old South End warehouse near the Pine Street Inn into more plush offices. (The paper’s content, management was told, didn’t fit the landlord’s mold.)

And they insist it has nothing to do with avoiding potential sexual harassment complaints by allowing the likes of “Miami’s Best Booty,” “Asian Pearl,” or “Chocolate Bunny” to flaunt their fleshy wares during photo shoots at their office, notable for its smattering of scuffed desks, half-empty bottles of Jack Daniel’s, and pictures of David Hasselhoff overlooking the Southeast Expressway.

This month, the top brass of Boston’s Weekly Dig, which over the past seven years has carved a niche in the local media scene and provided increasing competition to the Phoenix, decided to stop advertising escort services. The ads, most of them featuring nearly naked women, are a staple of alternative weeklies around the country — the Phoenix publishes a separate section filled with them — and they have long rankled local police, who say they serve as fronts for prostitution.

The salacious ads once accounted for 40 percent of the Dig’s revenue, the paper’s directors say, but this year dropped to about 5 percent, reflecting the paper’s success in landing new advertising accounts.

“I’m not in the business of providing my readers with a moral compass . . . and there are no issues of legality,” said Jeff Lawrence, the Dig’s president and founder. “I’m just honored to be in the position we’re in now. We’ve reached a position that we had an opportunity to change.”

Two years ago, Boston Magazine publisher Metrocorp bought a majority stake in the Dig, leading to the freebie’s redesign and a doubling of circulation, to nearly 60,000 copies a week, according to an independent audit.

The investment, Lawrence said, has helped the paper boost salaries and buy new equipment, nearly double the size of the staff to 28, and move into larger offices this summer.

It also gave the paper the ability to eliminate ads that Lawrence and ther staffers say don’t cater to their target audience, those between 18 and 34 years old.
They haven’t polled readers or assembled focus groups, Lawrence said, but he insists Dig readers don’t use ads for escorts because “they’re skewed to an older audience,” an apparent dig at the Phoenix, which he said targets “50-year-olds in Lexington.”

The Dig audience, however, does like porn, he said, and the Dig has continued to publish racy ads for exotic dancers, massage parlors, and everything from adult chat lines to services that get as explicit as offering “Free Sex.” Also, the paper’s website still offers escort ads, though they are free. (In the current newsstand edition, Lawrence said a “system glitch” mistakenly put one massage parlor ad under an “escort” heading.)

“Escort ads helped keep the lights on here for a long time,” said Chris Rohland, the Dig’s publisher, adding the paper has already replaced the revenue from the escort ads and expects to be profitable by the end of 2007. “We’re growing at a pace now where we felt we could get off the adult IV. We felt we should focus on attracting useful ads.”

Stephen M. Mindich, the Phoenix’s publisher, declined to comment on the Dig or his paper’s decision to continue publishing escort ads.

“I really have no need or interest to talk,” he said at his paper’s office in the Fenway.

In 1991, after police launched a sting and charged one of the Phoenix’s advertisers with running a $3 million prostitution ring that had more than 4,000 clients, Mindich told the Globe he had no problem continuing to publish escort ads. “I have no idea, literally, whether 80 percent are fronts or 80 percent are legitimate,” he said, noting it wasn’t the first time controversy arose over the ads. “We have not changed anything as a result . . . and have no intention of changing it.”

The Phoenix’s editor, Peter Kadzis, said the Dig has “cleverly discontinued a category that they’re not strong in. They’re making a PR play.”

When asked in a phone interview about the Dig’s rise as a competitor, he would only say: “I don’t make judgments based on what they do. Period.”

Neither The Boston Globe nor the Boston Herald publish escort ads. “Our standards reflect what our readers expect,” said Tim Murphy, the Globe’s vice president of advertising, marketing, and sales.

The Dig isn’t the first alternative weekly to give up escort ads, which are increasingly published for free on websites such as craigs list.com, said Richard Karpel, executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, a Washington-based advocacy group representing more than a hundred papers, including the Dig and the Phoenix. Other weeklies have debated giving up adult ads in an effort to attract more traditional advertisers, such as banks and department stores, Karpel said. But he hasn’t seen any ideological groundswell against publishing such ads.

To police in Boston, where 2,200 people have been arrested on prostitution-related charges in the past five years, there’s no question that escort ads are legal. There’s also no question that what they’re advertising often isn’t.

Over the past year, Sergeant Detective James Fong said he has arrested some 80 local prostitutes who advertised as escorts in the Dig, Phoenix, or online. Fong, one of the force’s few detectives who polices the city’s sex industry (the department disbanded its vice squad in the 1980s), said the only difference between prostitutes and those who advertise as escorts is that escorts don’t have to walk the streets.

“Without a doubt, the escort ads are advertising prostitution,” Fong said, adding that proving as much can be difficult. He said the escort service women he’s arrested on prostitution charges have ranged in age from 18 to 56; even when convicted, few serve time in jail.

Because of that low risk, he said, those who place escort ads have become increasingly explicit, effectively erasing the pretense that they are services to accompany the lonely, he said.

Over the last few years, the Dig has received multiple inquiries for information from Boston Police and the FBI about its advertisers, Lawrence and his advertising director say.

They’ve routinely refused to provide information, they say, though they recently complied with FBI demands about an advertiser allegedly linked to child pornography, and another linked to a group calling for “all types & sizes” to “work in adult films.”

But there was little secret about the Dig’s escort ad business, visible to anyone on the fifth floor of the warehouse the paper occupies in the city’s old garment district.

A parade of scantily clad women — some pregnant, and some toting children — ambled in regularly to have their pictures taken for a fee ranging from $75 to $150, depending on the size of the ad.

“Due to the nature of the business, we didn’t take credit cards,” said Nick Bolitho, the Dig’s classified ad director.

Some brought in their own pictures and advertising copy, which the staff sometimes edited for being too explicit or too raunchy, Bolitho said.

They had other standards, too: They say they refused to sell ads to women who had clients — or “hobbyists” — call the paper and complain about their escorts robbing them.

“As far as we were concerned, we said the ads were for someone who wanted company,” he said. “Whatever they wanted to do with their clients was up to them.”

Since the Dig stopped publishing escort ads, Bolitho said, he has received a dozen or so calls from escorts asking why they stopped running their ads.

“They seemed confused, and they just keep asking, `Why?’ ” he said. “We’ve told them to post their ads on our website.”

E-mail David Abel at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

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Battle Stations

By David Abel
Globe Staff
9/04/2005

It now causes untold pain, that little yellow light, the one on her dashboard, registering that her Dodge is really thirsty.

She can’t afford the high-priced fuel, she said, and so she now often begs friends for rides, or walks.

But when Vivian Campbell has no choice and must fill up her Caravan’s tank rather, add enough gas to get by for some time the 52-year-old Cambridge resident drives through her own city, passing maybe a half-dozen other stations, until she reaches a grimy stretch of Somerville, where four lines of cars idle until reaching a guy holding a wad of cash in one hand and a pungent nozzle in the other.

“This is the only place I’ll come for gas,” Campbell said.

Aris Auto and other independently owned stations are struggling to offer the best deals in Greater Boston. With prices for gas in the metro area surging this Labor Day weekend well beyond $3 a gallon — in some cases rising by the hour — they are fighting for every drop of business, tracking one another’s prices and lining up customers who drive in from miles away.

Aris’s eight pumps on Somerville Avenue, which at the end of August sold regular gas at $2.47 a gallon, offered the cheapest gas in the area, according to gasbuddy.com, and only 2 cents more than the best retail price for regular unleaded in the nation, according to the latest Lundberg Survey of 7,000 gas stations.

Line ’em up
At Aris, where on the same day last month its regular unleaded sold for 40 cents below a Shell station less than 3 miles away, a constant stream of rusted jalopies and shiny new sedans lined up.

They came from around the corner or miles away, with drivers from suburbs such as Lexington, Salem, and Waltham saying it was worth passing other stations, fighting traffic, and driving the distance to gas up at the inconveniently located station.

Twice a week, Bob Davis drives the roughly 10 miles from his home in Lexington to fill up at Aris, he said. An antiques dealer who drives around a lot, the 70-year-old has discovered a downside to his powerful new Ford pickup — it gets about 11 miles a gallon and now costs more than $80 to top off, he said.

“I look around at gas prices all the time, but this is the cheapest I can find,” Davis said. “It’s worth my time coming here.”

Cheap, of course, is relative.
A local cabdriver for the past decade, Paul Griffin often visits Aris twice a day. But with the cost of fuel increasingly cutting his profits — an average day now nets him only about $75 — the 50-year-old from Chelmsford has trouble looking at the old pump’s gauges.

Like many others, he resists filling up. It’s easier to pay $25 for gas twice in a day than it is to fork over $50 at once. “You get by how you can,” Griffin said.

A week before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and sent gas prices soaring further, Longin Holejko’s eyes bulged as he watched the pump reach $35 to fill his new Buick LaCrosse. The 70-year-old retired chemist, who drove to Aris from Arlington, couldn’t believe he’s getting only about 13 miles a gallon. The dealership, he said, told him the car would be more fuel efficient.

Then he handed over the cash.

“I’m not happy,” he griped. “It may be cheaper here, but the cost is still outrageous.”

`He’s just crazy’
How does Aris do it, particularly when other stations in the area charge significantly more — some on the same day last month by as much as 40 cents?

“He’s out of his mind — he’s just crazy,” said Jack Orchanian, 52, who for the past 30 years has owned the small station less than a mile and half north of Aris on Massachusetts Avenue. On a recent day at Jack’s, also known for low prices, a sign advertising its regular unleaded read 8 cents more than at Aris.

“He’s not even covering his overhead,” Orchanian said of Aris’s owner. “Well, if he wants to give his gas away, that’s up to him.”

To cover costs and make it worth his time to sell gas, Orchanian tries to keep his margin at 10 cents above what he pays his suppliers. Which means if he sells 2,000 gallons a day, average for his station now, he takes in about $200. Money from a repair business and sales of other merchandise must carry the rest of his payroll, insurance, utilities, and other expenses.

On the same day Aris was selling gas for $2.47, Orchanian said he paid his suppliers $2.47 a gallon to fill his station, just 2 cents more than Aris had paid its distributor. “I just don’t understand how he’s doing it,” he said.

A few blocks away, another independently owned competitor called Gas with a Smile was selling self-serve regular for 11 cents a gallon more than Aris.

The station manager, Chris Poutakidis, scratched his head when asked why there was such a difference in price, particularly after noting how his station had already cut its usual margin from an average of 25 cents a gallon to 18 cents. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “How does he stay in business?”

Reached on a cellphone while steering a boat in the waters off his native Greece, George Varelis, who bought Aris from a fellow Greek in 1981, explained how he undercuts the competition and still pays attendants to pump petrol for all his customers: He has already paid off the station’s mortgage, so his overhead isn’t too much of a burden. He also charges 5 cents a gallon extra for purchases with credit cards, which means most sales are in cash and he doesn’t lose as much to Visa or American Express. Another reason is that he works in volume, hoping that low prices attract more customers, many of whom may also bring in their cars for repairs.

Despite the station’s constant traffic, receipts have shrunk in recent months, Varelis and his managers say. There are plenty of drivers at the pumps, but more have either cut back on how much they’ll spend on each visit or found alternatives to using their cars, they say. Still, Aris now has on average 600 customers buy about 10,000 gallons a day, about five times more customers than Jack’s Gas.

“It’s not by accident that we have the lowest prices around,” Varelis said. “We drive around every day and look at all the prices. We always try to be the cheapest.”

On the day last month when Aris hawked its full-serve regular at $2.47 a gallon –like stations throughout the region, the price has since soared much further — a receipt from the station’s distributor showed Varelis paid only 2 cents less to have his tanks filled.

“This is not the time to make money,” he said.

“It’s hard enough for a lot of people, and more than anything, I want to keep my customers. So I feel obligated, and sometimes I lose a little.”

Selling below the price paid for gas is illegal in Massachusetts and about a dozen other states. Varelis’s losses come from having too small a margin to cover all costs, he said, let alone make a profit.

Over the last week, Aris saw its prices rise from $2.47 to $2.69 to $2.89 to $3.09 to $3.25, as of Thursday.

“The prices are going up so quickly, we have to raise them every day now,” said Herbie Burnett, one of the managers at Aris. “Some stations I’ve seen haven’t changed their price on their signs, but they’ve gone up at the pumps, which is illegal. We’re just trying to survive right now.”
The corporate difference

Though some nearby stations have competed with Aris by keeping their price within a few cents, others seem to have opted out of the price wars, particularly those run by the corporate behemoths that occupy such prime real estate that they don’t fret about being low-balled.

Less than 3 miles away from Aris, along Magazine Beach on Memorial Drive, the Shell station there advertised its full-serve regular for $2.87 a gallon and its top grade “V-Power” for $3.02.
On the same day late last month, when these were relatively expensive prices, another Shell station, just off Interstate 93 in South Bay, was selling self-serve regular for $2.81 a gallon, $3.05 for V-Power.

“All I can say about our prices is that they’re set by the corporate office,” said Philip Kwan, a mechanic running the Magazine Beach Shell.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

SIDEBAR
1:HOW TO FIND THE CHEAPEST GASThere are several sources for checking out the best gas prices in your neighborhood. Here are three popular online sites:
AAA.com: Click on the “Fuel Price Finder” line. Choose stations within 3-, 5-, or 10-mile distances.

fuelmeup.com: Breakdowns by brand and grade; encourages drivers to post information on where to find cheap gas.

gasbuddy.com: Includes stations throughout the US, as well as Canada. Also asks for driver input.

PUTTING THE BRAKES ON GAS CONSUMPTION
1. Slow down. Dropping speed decreases the aerodynamic drag. Cutting down to 62 miles per hour from 75, for example, can reduce gas use by about 15 percent.

2. Don’t be abrupt with the accelerator or the brakes . Using slow, steady acceleration and braking can increase fuel economy by as much as 20%.

3. Keep tires pumped. Maintain the tire air pressure recommended by the vehicle manufacturer. A single tire under inflated by two pounds per square inch can increase fuel consumption by 1 percent.

4. Lose the cool. The air conditioner puts an extra load on the engine, burning 20 percent more gas. The defrost on most vehicles does the same.

5. Close the windows. Especially at highway speeds, open windows increase drag and decrease fuel economy by as much as 10 percent.

6. Car care. Proper service and maintenance avoids poor fuel economy related to dirty air filters, old spark plugs, or low fluid levels.

7. Cruise. Use of cruise control, keeping speed steady over long distances, saves gas.

8. Travel light. Heavy loads hog gas. Pack lightly for long trips.

9. Idle losers. Shut off the car when you know you’ll be stopped for more than a minute. Restarting the car uses less fuel than letting it idle for that amount of time.

10. Buy a fuel-efficient vehicle. Think small, and shift for yourself. Manual transmission usually offers better fuel economy.
Source: Gasbuddy.com

IS EXPENSIVE GAS BETTER GAS?
Asked whether some stations charge more for gas because they sell better petrol, John Paul, a spokesman for AAA Southern New England, said much of the gas in the area comes off the same tankers that dock in East Boston. The only significant difference is that some companies have trucks with special tanks, which mix the gas with additives that may reduce engine knock.

“Essentially, gasoline is gasoline, and it will perform similarly in the same cars,” Paul said. “So, for most people, I recommend they try to buy the cheapest gas they can find.”

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