title: “Blowing Smoke” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-20” author: “Jeffrey Monigold”
To these uncertainties, add the fog of reasonable doubt. Like it or not, McVeigh and Nichols will be tried in what could be called the post-O.J. (and post-Menendez) era. From the standpoint of an aggressive defense attorney, this means that just about anything goes, as long as it has the potential for persuading one or more jurors to accept an alternative theory of the crime. Under federal statutes, the OKBomb case could mean the death penalty for both defendants: the stakes couldn’t be higher. That may be why McVeigh’s attorney, Stephen Jones, launched a flank attack on the government’s case in an Oklahoma court last week.
Jones’s motion, part of a civil suit against McVeigh filed by the parents of two bombing victims, may be a publicity ploy. But taken at face value, it suggests a transatlantic conspiracy of neo-Nazi sympathizers who may somehow be connected to OKBomb. Three are Britons, two are Americans – and one is a German national, Andreas (Andy) Strassmeir, 36, who admittedly had met Timothy McVeigh. None of the six, according to the papers Jones filed in court, is alleged to have actually taken part in the conspiracy. But Jones seeks the right to take sworn statements from each to see what they know about the case or about unknown conspirators. This is a legal fishing expedition whose real objective, in all probability, is to sow confusion in the minds of prospective jurors when the criminal case comes to trial: call it creative lawyering. By playing on the unresolved questions about the investigation, Jones could convince the jury that McVeigh may not have been the plot’s mastermind, as the government alleges, and does not deserve to die. ““The government says “There’s nothing to the conspiracy’,’’ Jones says. ““There is a damaging lack of curiosity into what the facts are. . . . Assuming they were involved, [McVeigh and Nichols] lacked the money, the surveillance capabilities and the sophistication. It was beyond their capabilities.''
Beyond that bald assertion, Jones offers a pastiche of innuendo straight out of Oliver Stone. The most tantalizing bit involves Andreas Strassmeir and a telephone call McVeigh allegedly made days before the bombing to a far-right Christian commune in eastern Oklahoma called Elohim City. Elohim City is run by the Rev. Robert Millar, who espouses an avowedly racist brand of Christianity. Millar, who would not talk to NEWSWEEK, was ““spiritual adviser’’ to the late Richard Wayne Snell, a rabid white supremacist who was executed in Arkansas on April 19, 1995, the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. Jones suggests that Snell’s execution – not the anniversary of the Branch Davidian tragedy at Waco – may have been the real motive for OKBomb. And if so, he says, investigators should be looking for a conspiracy with neo-Nazi or white-supremacist roots.
Enter Strassmeier, who admits he spent two years at Elohim City before leaving in 1995. (He is now in Berlin.) The son of a prominent German politician, Strassmeir is a former lieutenant in the German army who enjoyed the pseudomilitary atmosphere that pervaded Millar’s compound. He is not known to German authorities as a neo-Nazi sympathizer and his U.S. lawyer, Kirk Lyons, says Strassmeir knew McVeigh only slightly. Still, federal investigators say McVeigh called Elohim City on April 5, 1995, just minutes after he allegedly reserved the Ryder truck that carried the bomb to Oklahoma City. Lyons concedes that McVeigh was calling Strassmeir but says the message never got through. Why did McVeigh call at all? Only McVeigh knows, and he’s not talking. Strassmeir, meanwhile, complains he has been hounded by the press since his McVeigh con-nection became known. ““I really don’t remember [McVeigh] at all,’’ he told NEWSWEEK, adding that he ““had absolutely nothing to do’’ with the bombing.
It gets even fuzzier from there. Jones wants to interrogate Strassmeir and Lyons, who has a history of representing right-wing radicals and who is himself something of a celebrity among neo-fascists in the United States and Europe. (An associate denied that Lyons had any prior knowledge of the bombing.) And Jones wants to question Dennis Mahon, 46, a former imperial dragon in the Oklahoma KKK and an organizer for a group called the White Aryan Resistance. Mahon said Strassmeir is ““a good friend’’ but doubted that ““Andy’’ had a role in OKBomb; he denied taking any part himself.
Jones is also asking to talk to John Tyndall, leader of the ultraright British National Party; David Irving, a British historian known to be active in right-wing circles, and Charles Sargent, the reputed leader of a British neo-fascist group called C18. Tyndall told NEWSWEEK he knows Kirk Lyons and has heard of Dennis Mahon, but has never discussed McVeigh or Oklahoma City with either. Sargent’s father told NEWSWEEK he didn’t know where Sargent was and wouldn’t tell a reporter if he did.
Irving, who has written biographies of Hitler, Goring and Joseph Goebbels, said he knows Lyons but was ““shocked and embarrassed’’ to find his name on Jones’s little list. There’s another twist: Irving said he has already been in touch with U.S. officials about a possible connection to the OKBomb case. That came last year when, Irving said, he discovered that James Nichols, Terry Nichols’s older brother, was a contributor to a legal-defense fund that Irving calls his ““worldwide fan club.’’ ““I turned over his address’’ to a U.S. Embassy official in London, Irving said. ““I want to stay on the right side of this.’’ He also said he was ““horrified’’ by the bombing.
What does it add up to? Not much, according to Justice Department sources. One official said the Feds are aware of Andreas Strassmeir, but, the more they look at it, the less substantial it appears to be. Jones, on the other hand, tells NEWSWEEK that the FBI is derelict for not interrogating a man ““who lived two hours away from where the bombing occurred, lived at a white-separatist compound . . . has admitted knowing Tim McVeigh and received a phone call from McVeigh.’’ Point taken: NEWSWEEK’S source says federal investigators will probably talk to Strassmeir, if only to show the FBI has checked out every lead. That may persuade a jury to convict McVeigh and Nichols – but the paranoia about the case could last for years.
title: “Blowing Smoke” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-07” author: “Lisette Abney”
You’d never guess it, but there are actually a few Americans left who’ve never smoked a cigar. Maybe you’re even one of them. Are you curious? Assuming you’re of legal age and your health insurance is paid up, let’s get you a cigar. First thing to do is select a premium ““stick.’’ Forget those White Owls the plumber left under your sink; what you need is a cigar made by hand, containing only whole-leaf ““long filler’’ tobacco. This’ll set you back a bit, perhaps as much as $25, but the finer things in life don’t come cheap. Once you’ve got your cigar, settle back into a comfortable spot - a nice leather chair, maybe - and look it over. You’ll notice that one end, called the foot, is open. The other end, the head, is capped with a bit of tobacco leaf. Before you light up, you’ll need to slice open the head, ideally with a special cutter - Alfred Dunhill sells a nice one for $395. All systems go? OK, time for ignition. First hold the cigar at a 45-degree angle, with the foot toward the floor. Do not stick the head in your mouth yet. Slowly turn the foot of the cigar just above the flame of a long cedar match. Once it’s glowing evenly, place it in your mouth and draw. Don’t inhale - just pull in gently with your cheeks. Allow the end product of careful cultivation and years of aging to fill your mouth. Let it linger for a moment, then expel it briskly into the surrounding atmosphere. Repulsive, isn’t it?
Let’s just say that cigars are an acquired taste. They also may be the most expensive, least healthful way yet devised to ruin a perfectly good set of drapes. Still - as anyone with two eyes and a functioning pair of nostrils is likely aware - cigars are about the hottest thing going. Sales of premium cigars have more than doubled over the past four years. Pin-striped fat cats, Wall Street wanna-bes, irony-drenched Gen-Xers and just plain folks-with-smokes crowd the wood-paneled, leather-chaired cigar bars and ““humidor societies’’ that have popped up in just about any city you can name. Restaurants and hotels host lavish dinners for cigar smokers, tripping over each other in a rush to market themselves as ““cigar friendly.’’ Bill Clinton has been seen on the golf course with a stick jutting from the presidential jaw, though his people say he’s just chewing them. Less conflicted movie stars and fashion models mug from the covers of glossy magazines like Cigar Aficionado and Smoke. All in all, we’re strutting around like a nation of people who’ve made a killing in the stock market - which, come to think of it, we are.
We are also, on the other hand, a country full of people who recoil from tobacco smoke like Dracula from sunlight. Public smoking is increasingly banned, even outdoors. When American tobacco companies agreed last month to cough up $368 billion in compensation for the damage that cigarettes have wreaked upon the health of millions, the settlement was immediately attacked as too lenient. How is it, then, that this year’s must-have accessory is a smog-billowing cheroot the size of a baby’s arm?
Perhaps the ultimate testimony to cigar smoking’s cultural penetration is a recent study finding that teenagers are taking up the habit. The trend’s ripple effects have extended to the barrios of Cuba, where workers who make $10 a month can sell two boxes of (usually counterfeit) Havanas for $40 to Cohiba-coveting American tourists. And in the American heartland, cigar chic has touched even its least willing participants. ““You can still find a good $2 cigar,’’ says Jack Brunotte, a Des Moines, Iowa, beat cop who has been smoking stogies for 35 years, ““but it’s damn hard.’’ Reason: what Brunotte calls ““this Yuppie thing’’ has created shortages of shade-leaf tobacco, used to wrap even the most modest cigars. On the boomer side of town demand remains high, whatever the price. ““Sure, this is a $15 cigar,’’ says Jeff Frame, a 33-year-old accountant attending a recent Des Moines smoker. Gesturing with the object of his affection, he says that it’s ““worth $15 because I’ll be tasting it for the next three days.’’ Clearly this man is under the influence of a powerful spell. But how was it cast?
The story begins, as so many American tales do these days, with a lawsuit. The embargo against Cuba signed by President Kennedy in 1962 pretty much killed the U.S. market for premium cigars. But in 1975 a Cuban exile named Pepe Garcia, who’d had his cigar company expropriated by the Marxists in 1960, persuaded a federal judge to grant him the right to use sev- eral famous Cuban brand names in the United States. Though they contained no Cuban tobacco, H. Upmann and Montecristo cigars, which hadn’t been seen (legally) stateside since the inception of the embargo, began to reappear on store shelves. Other expatriates followed Garcia’s example, and by the mid-’80s the U.S. companies that controlled the premium brands were selling 100 million of the cigars a year, twice what they’d sold a decade before.
Still, in the popular imagination, cigars conjured up the image of a stogie-chomping union boss or, at the other end of the social scale, a gloating fat-cat industrialist. Neither was considered a desirable role model. In 1983 those associations began to change. Henry Schielein arrived at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston that year to assume his duties as general manager. After dinner one night in the hotel with a colleague, Schielein pulled out a cigar and lit up. ““Henry,’’ his friend said, ““if I were the new GM here, I wouldn’t smoke cigars in the dining room.’’ Schielein put it out. ““But I could see some of the guys around me,’’ he says. ““I could read their eyes, and they were saying, “God, the guy has the right idea’.’’ Soon thereafter, the Ritz held its first cigar smoker, a clubby black-tie dinner where gentlemen could puff in peace. Now the much imitated annual dinner costs $500 and boasts a waiting list hundreds of names long. ““The more you charge,’’ says Richard Elia, publisher of the Quarterly Review of Wines and one of the dinner’s organizers, ““the more they want it.''
That’s because cigars are by now almost universally perceived -among those who smoke them, that is - as status symbols. Credit that to Marvin Shanken, publisher of the five-year-old glossy Cigar Aficionado. When Shanken, prodded either by a hunch, as he maintains, or by the quiet but meticulous research that others suggest, made the decision to launch the magazine, it was far from a no-brainer. Shanken had timed the ’80s wine boom perfectly with his first hit magazine, The Wine Spectator. But when he returned from a trip to Cuba and announced plans for Cigar Aficionado, ““everyone wrote him off as a total lunatic,’’ says Simon Chase, marketing VP at London cigar distributor Hunters & Frankau. ““A lot of people at Wine Spectator were afraid he was spending their pensions.''
They had nothing to worry about. Readers quickly cottoned to Cigar Aficionado’s manly portrayal of the good life: fine spirits, fast cars and fat cigars, the last described and rated with a fervor previously reserved for vintage wines. One recent example: “"[The Griffin’s No. 400] starts out slow, perhaps because of youth. But it has some nutty flavors, with a slightly leathery finish.’’ Nutty, indeed. But CA’s circulation now stands at more than 410,000. ““I love to look at the magazines,’’ says Brunotte, the Des Moines cop. ““I have one next to me all the time. It’s like porno.''
Clearly, there’s well-orchestrated marketing behind the cigar boom. But the industry’s total ad budget is a paltry $4 million a year, compared with the $5 billion or so spent pushing cigarettes. When you look closer at this improbable trend, it’s the sociological and psychological factors that emerge. ““Cigars are a wonderfully placed symbol in an age driven by icons,’’ says Watts Wacker, resident futurist at the Stanford Research Institute. ““It hits on so many primal buttons.’’ Behind the demand side of the cigar boom is clearly the same drive toward conspicuous consumption that made ““Yuppie’’ a household word in the ’80s. Sure, we’ve already got Range Rovers, power ties, microbrews and gourmet stores stocked with more types of olive oil than there are Italians. But what can ’90s boomers consume more conspicuously than a cigar? A cigar doesn’t merely display its owner’s taste - it literally waves it under other people’s noses. Another very ’90s cadre that’s puffing up this trend, cool-hunters say, is the hip-hop set, es- pecially the rap impresarios. Cigars are showing up in videos and on album covers - including the Wu-Tang Clan’s new CD, ““Wu-Tang Forever,’’ which recent- ly debuted at No. 1. The stogie as cool- tool has been building for a while, says Mimi Valdez, style and fashion editor for The Source magazine, ““and now it’s at a frenzy.''
Reaction against another Yuppie obsession - health - is also driving cigars’ popularity. Wacker sees a broad shift in attitude underway. ““It’s going from “life is too short’ to “life is too long’,’’ he says. Boomers looking ahead to the infirmi- ties of old age, he argues, have begun to wonder whether they’re not entitled to front-load a little more fun. ““People are becoming more concerned with well-being than fitness,’’ Wacker says. ““They think they may be better off having a cigar once in a while.''
Beyond its symbolic value, a cigar is also a ““cheap thrill,’’ says Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute. ““A cheap Rolex watch. A cheap BMW.’’ A cheap BMW with a heck of an emissions problem, maybe. But unlike, say, sports cars, Thoroughbreds or other totems of success, even expensive cigars are accessible to the social-climbing masses.
Everyone has their reasons for smoking cigars, but few groups inspire the curiosity that stogie-wielding women do. No one really knows how many women are light- ing up; estimates usually run from 1 to 5 percent of the market. Diana Silvus-Gits, the owner of Up Down Tobacco in Chicago for 34 years, says that’s low. She estimates that 10 to 12 percent of her customers are women. Women-only smokers fill the calendar at Butler’s in Washington, D.C.’s Grand Hyatt and the Morton’s of Chicago steakhouse chain. And that’s not enough for some people. ““Every woman should try a cigar,’’ insists Tomima Edmark, author of ““Cigar Chic: A Woman’s Perspective.’’ ““It is one of the finer things in life - like a glass of Cristal champagne.’’ Edmark argues that cigar smoking is good for relationships. She and her husband convene about once a week to share cigars in their Dallas home’s custom-built smoking room. ““A good cigar takes an hour to smoke,’’ she says. ““If you’re doing this with your husband, you can’t help but have a conversation.''
Mark Grossich, who opened what is widely believed to be New York’s first cigar bar, Hudson Bar and Books, in 1990 (and since has opened four others), has polled his female customers on cigars’ appeal. They reported that cigar smoking created in them a volatile mixture of feelings - the majority cited ““sexy and sensual,’’ along with ““powerful and in control.’’ The other big question, of course, is not why cigars might appeal to women, but why women with cigars appeal so much to men. We’ll leave that one to Freud.
For some longtime cigar smokers, explanations are beside the point. They’re just looking for deliverance from their pastime’s new trendiness. ““I’m walking down Newbury Street,’’ says a horrified Richard Elia, the Boston publisher, ““and I see a guy coming out of a wine bar with a phone in one hand and a cigar that absolutely doesn’t fit his face in the other. I turned to my wife and said, “I hope you’ll shoot me if that happens to me’.''
Backlash is brewing. The American Cancer Society recently put out a public-service ad suggesting that those snazzy cigar cutters could also come in handy for excising lip tumors. After a Wall Street Journal story last week about health activists’ new offensive, the stocks of Culbro and its spinoff, General Cigar, took a hit. Demand has already pushed cigar prices up and, in many cases, quality down, turning off established and potential customers alike. The trend could also run out of cool. The aura of exclusivity has already been eroded; it’s hard to fancy yourself a player when you buy your fine cigars out of the walk-in humidor at Sal’s Sunoco.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for the smoke to subside. Major cigar manufacturers continue to report double-digit sales growth, and new cigar bars and clubs are still opening. Packaged-goods analyst Don Stuart of Cannondale Associates foresees three more smoke-filled years - at least.
Trends-marketing consultant Lawrence Samuel of Minneapolis-based Iconoculture, Inc., says cigars have moved into the final phase of the four-stage life span that all trends pass through. First something bubbles up on society’s fringes. At that stage, in the parlance of those who parse such things professionally, it’s ““pre-cool.’’ As cigars gradually wove themselves into the fabric of hip city life, they became officially ““cool.’’ That happened in, let’s say, 1995. Since, they’ve gone mainstream, into the ““post-cool’’ stage. ““This is when corporate America starts cloning it,’’ says Samuel. Witness furniture carrying the Cigar Aficionado brand, or the Calvin Klein cigar cutter. This year, by Samuel’s reckoning, cigars are becoming ““neo-cool.’’ ““This is where it gets weird,’’ he says, predicting the reinvention or mutation of the trend. It’s too early to say how this final phase will play out, but it’s worth noting that New York’s Beekman Bar and Books has already held its first pipe smoker.
