Note: The particularly important details and music artist names are in bold text. Licensed music track names are in italics.
The year is 1973, five years after the events of the Mafia III, and 22 years since Vito Scaletta’s seen or heard from his old friend Joe Barbaro. The canon ending of Mafia III with this Mafia IV story is Vito taking over the city after Lincoln skipped town, however Cassandra and Burke are left alive and loyal to both Vito and Lincoln still. Burke was able to survive his liver cancer by getting a black market liver transplant in Mexico, like he did in his ending, except with Vito running the city. On Vito and Lincoln’s behalf, Burke and Cassandra agree to stay behind in New Bordeaux and keep the city locked down, incase Leo Galante and the Commission try anything.
The beginning cutscene is Vito answering his telephone after getting up in the morning in his new penthouse, on the top floor of the New Bordeaux casino he finished that was once Sal Marcano's, and grabbing a cup of coffee. It's Alma with some urgent news. Lincoln Clay came down to the cigar warehouse to visit her after 5 years of silence, and he has big news.
Joe is alive in Empire Bay and has been this entire time. However, as punishment for his actions, he's become Leo Galante's personal driver against his will and is forbidden from contacting Vito ever again, or else him and Vito will be killed. Alma then tells Vito to meet Lincoln at the airport to learn more, as he's already there awaiting Vito's arrival. When they're away from anyone who could listen in on their conversation, Lincoln tells Vito he has a friend named John Donovan he's going to introduce him to, hiding in the outskirts of Empire Bay, ready to help Vito and Lincoln with their new mission
Vito gets dressed in one of his signature trench coats with a suit and tie, ready to rain down hell on the Vinci crime family and their allies, and finally be reunited with his lifelong friend he previously thought was dead, Joe Barbaro.
Here is my idea for the kill list, all related to the Commission in Empire Bay and their allies.

Leo Galante - Top target on the list, Vinci family consigliere who's in with the Commission and the man you thought put Joe in the ground for the past 22 years. Bury this wrinkly old cocksucker.
Johnny Galante - Vinci family capo and younger relative of Leo's mentioned in Cassandra's ending, possibly Leo's cousin even. John Donovan knows that the two are close, and that Johnny's a valuable asset to Leo's organization. Kill him both to hurt Leo's earn and influence, and to hit him straight in the heart by taking away his family and everyone he loves
Michele Galante Jr. - Another Vinci family capo, and Leo Galante’s youngest brother. Killing Leo’s little brother will both take away one of his most reliable allies, and leave him stricken with grief and enraged, and more prone to making mistakes.
Nunzio Galante - Leo’s seasoned older brother by 3 years, and yet another Vinci family capo. He knows enough about smuggling that he worked out an ingenious plan for smuggling military grade weapons into the city. He pays off corrupt officials at Empire Bay International Airport, to allow guns to be loaded inside the walls and floors of planes, unknown to everyone onboard save for the palms the Galantes and Frank Vinci have greased to cooperate and keep quiet. The time has come to put this crafty old bastard in the ground.
Don Frank Vinci - Frank Vinci is the boss of the Vinci crime family, the family Leo's been a consigliere of for decades, and a lifelong friend of his. Kill Frank, and Leo loses more ground than he could ever imagine, and will be forced to deal with both the loss of his boss, and the loss of his lifelong childhood friend.
Don Ennio Salieri - Longtime close friend of both Frank Vinci and Leo Galante, Don of the Salieri crime family, and a third party Frank and Leo call in to crush Vito's uprising, when it becomes too big of an issue for Vinci alone to handle. Salieri was eventually able to grease enough palms while behind bars to have his life sentence overturned, and he got released from prison on good behavior in 1953, after he served 15 years of his sentence. He’s since relocated to his main operations to Empire Bay, having already had connections and men present there while he was in prison, backed by the Commission and the Vinci crime family. He's seasoned, but he’s nothing Mr. Scaletta can't handle. Give this tired old fuck the gangland ending he's had coming.
Isaac - Isaac is the personal assistant to an influential loan shark named Bruno Levine, who handles the money of the Commission, including the Vinci crime family and the Salieri crime family. He does anything from serve his boss coffee, to count incoming and outgoing money for Bruno. Because of his duties, he's aware of Bruno's location at all times. You’ll need to get to Isaac to get information on his boss out of him, and dispose of him afterwards if you want to get to Bruno.
Bruno Levine - Bruno is a Jewish-American loan shark who kicks up all of his earn to both Frank Vinci and Ennio Salieri, and the Commission in Empire Bay. Killing him kills a lot of earn for the Commission, and they loses a valuable asset. In addition to getting rid of him being practical, to add insult to injury, he gave your father that loan. It's about time to put this asshole out of business.
Mr. Chu & Mr. Chu Jr. - This old man has been leading the Empire Bay Triads with an iron fist since before you were even born. The bastard has a son too, who eventually went on to become his underboss. The Empire Bay Triads became a close ally of the Vinci crime family, the Salieri crime family, and the Commission shortly after Vito killed Don Carlo Falcone in 1951, forming a lucrative partnership with the Commission. Mr. Chu and his eldest son are valuable assets for Leo Galante who give him extra reach. Melt their iron fists and show these two pricks just who they fucked with.
Eddie Scarpa - This cocksucker used to be Carlo Falcone's underboss for as long as you could remember. After you whacked Falcone in the fall of 1951, he decided to throw in with Vinci to save his own skin. He took over the smuggling and dock union extortion that fat fuck Derek Pappalardo used to run. You know all too well how to deal with this sorry fuckin' rat.

I'm thinking Vito and Joe work with Lincoln Clay and John Donovan to split up Empire Bay and distribute territory to three other factions not unlike what Lincoln did with New Bordeaux. This time though, this is a much larger city in a much, much different part of the United States. The empire building mechanics would be a lot smoother, more robust, and streamlined compared to Mafia III. They would work similarly a more modernized version of how the hit city sandbox game Scarface: The World Is Yours handled it's empire building and management mechanics, minus the whole switching to other characters lower on the ladder to do your bidding. This would be ideal for a story rich organized crime game in my opinion. Here are my ideas for those factions, all close allies of the up and coming Scaletta crime family.
The Cuban mob led by Alma Diaz. Vito goes way back with Alma, and she does not hesitate to answer him and Lincoln's calls to save Joe's life and royally fuck both Leo Galante and the Vinci family.
Conti crime family, led by Enzo Conti. This Conti crime family formed sometime in late 1968, months after Lincoln helped Enzo flee New Bordeaux and drop off of Sal Marcano's radar. It turns out he fled north to Empire Bay and finally formed his own family, having more than enough years of experience in the underworld to handle the job. Lincoln's tight with him and manages to recruit him to Vito and Joe's cause.
The Yakuza, based out of Empire Bay's Japantown. Longtime sworn enemies of the Empire Bay Triads, with bad blood going back decades. They would greatly enjoy seeing Mr. Chu and his son's heads mounted on pikes, along with whacking everyone who's ever supported their organization. You don't know them well, and they're known to be very unpredictable and ruthless. Use these traits to your advantage when taking on the Commission of Empire Bay and their friends.
I should mention as expected, this entire 1973 section where you play as Vito is much shorter than Mafia III. Vito's takeover is shown much more quickly over time than Lincoln's, and there's time skips during it, to keep it short and sweet, and to show onscreen only what's important. There is also no option for your underbosses to betray you, as to reduce confusion and keep the story consistently the same each playthrough, like the first two Mafia games.
However, unlike Mafia III, after all of these tasks are completed and every single assassination target on Vito’s kill list is dealt with, the game does not end. In fact, it's not even anywhere near close to being over yet. Vito's 1973 section was merely the beginning act. It was really a lead up to an entirely new Mafia story, centering around a newcomer to the American mob. Fast forward two years following Vito’s rampage that led to him taking over Empire Bay and the Commission, in the year 1975 him and Joe now rule Empire Bay, with Vito as the Don of the Scaletta Crime Family, and Joe working as his loyal underboss. You play the rest of the game as a young up and coming soldato named Louis in his 20’s, who’s a rising star in Vito’s organization. Do right by Mr. Scaletta and Mr. Barbaro, understand kid?
My basic idea for the character and his backstory is that he's a young Italian-Canadian mobster from Toronto, Ontario, or whatever Mafia's equivalent of it could be called. Let's call him Louis DeSimone. His family hails from Tuscany in Italy and moved to Toronto, Ontario in 1939, shortly after World War II broke out in Europe. Louis DeSimone was born in July 1952 in Toronto, and was raised in Toronto's Little Italy. Being northern Italian and hailing from Tuscany, Louis has blond hair and green eyes, making him visually very distinct from past series protagonists, who were all dark haired brunets with brown eyes. Louis fled south to Empire Bay when the feds started cracking down on his old family and put his boss in prison, and he ended up finding a new home with the Scaletta crime family. The first few missions playing as Louis DeSimone involve shooting your away out of an arrest by a Toronto Police Service SWAT team in Toronto in December 1974, seeing the rest of the members of your old crime family either get arrested or shot in front of you as you make your escape. You spend the next two missions fleeing Ontario through Quebec and upstate New York, before finally arriving in Empire Bay in early 1975, late January to be exact. Winter is in full force with snow everywhere, Louis' arrival to Empire Bay for the first time in his life mirroring Vito's return to Empire Bay in 1945 30 years earlier, except under far different much more dire circumstances. Louis' older brother and his father, both capos in his old crime family in Toronto, are shown to be arrested by the TPS SWAT team in his first mission, the same one that attempted to gun him down when he resisted arrested. Louis knows someone had to have ratted out his old crime family, and he wants to find out who someday. The thing is though, he doesn't just want to kill them. He wants to get out of them why they did it before he kills them. More than anything else, he just wants to find out why his crime family was betrayed and served up to the feds on a silver platter, having most of his biological family sent to prison in the process. He’s out to uncover the mystery of why his family fell apart, and he’s more than willing to help people like Don Vito Scaletta and his underboss Joe Barbaro to eventually get the answers he seeks. In the end, he’s not even after revenge primarily, more than that, he wants answers and information regarding the fare of his old crime family, and wants to know why his family fell apart. I came up with the idea for this character because I figured that playing as a fugitive from the law made sense for the mob life, and I'm surprised we haven't had a fugitive protagonist in the Mafia series yet.
In the 1975 chapters while playing as Louis, the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon’s resignation, and the official end to the Vietnam War are all discussed on the in-game radio during news segments. In the last 1979 chapter, the beginning of the Soviet-Afghan War is also the subject of a news segment on the radio.
The story eventually transitions into the 1980's as years pass, with the scenery, cars, and music changing accordingly, and historical events of the time discussed in the game. In the 1989 section of the game, the murder of the infamous former Sinclair Parish Sheriff Walter “Slim” Beaumont is mentioned on the in-game radio, as just over 21 years ago Slim and his corruption ring were the top headline of national news. the time the game ends, it's 1992, and significant historical events from the past few years at the time that are covered on the radio in-game include anything from the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the 1992 L.A. riots. The rise of the internet and home computers are briefly touched upon during news segments on the in-game radio during the early 1990's section of the story, but not greatly delved into given their relative infancy in that time period. During this entire 1975-1992 stretch of the story, Vito is no longer playable, and Don Scaletta takes a backseat in the story as a main supporting character, similar to Don Salieri throughout Mafia: Definitive Edition. You now play as the Italian-Canadian Scaletta family soldato Louis DeSimone, who is later promoted to being a capo in 1985. At the end of the game in 1992, Louis is promoted to Consigliere of the Scaletta crime family, and it’s revealed in the epilogue that he became the don of the family in 2006 at the age of 54, and his now released from prison older brother serving as his underboss, and and Enzo Conti’s grandson Giovanni Conti serving as consigliere, taking over from Louis’ previous position which before that belonged to his father and Enzo’s only son, Lorenzo Conti from 1973-1992. It is worth noting that unlike Don Salieri, Don Scaletta has much more integrity, and has more genuine loyalty for his men and his associates. If you've beaten Mafia 1 or Mafia: Definitive Edition, you'll know this is something Salieri lacked in the end. Over time, Louis also goes from having a strictly business relationship with Vito and Joe, to bonding with them and becoming a genuinely close friend and trusted member of the family, seeing Vito as something of a second father, and coming to see Joe as the fun uncle he never had. Another major character development theme is Louis DeSimone adapting and assimilating into Italian-American culture in his new home in the Northeastern US, it seeming like something new mixed with the familiar Italian-Canadian culture he was raised in back in Ontario just north of the border.
The game will include a number of hit music from the 70’s that played on the radio back then, such as Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street and Tony Christie’s (Is This the Way to) Amarillo, The Grateful Dead's Casey Jones and at least a few songs by the then new American rock band Cheap Trick, as well as popular songs from the 1960’s people still listened to at the time, such as Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ Wooly Bully, King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man, Zager and Evans' In the Year 2525, The Zombies' Time of the Season, and Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walkin'. When you progress through the game, especially after you switch to playing as Louis DeAngelo for the rest of the story, years change, and the music changes. Different songs start playing on the radio, such as Sylvester's You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), Randy Crawford's Street Life, and The Village People's Y.M.C.A., Cheryl Lynn's Got to Be Real, Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive, and the Bee Gees' Stayin' Alive start playing in the 1979 portion of the game. After you've completed the 1975 section of the game, Foghat's Slow Ride starts playing on the radio. Starting in the 1977 section of the game, Cheap Trick's I Want You to Want Me and Heart's Barracuda start playing on the radio. In the 1980's portion of the game, Thomas Dolby's songs Hyperactive! and She Blinded Me with Science, in addition to Night Ranger's Sister Christian also start playing on the radio. If Hangar 13 can afford the licenses, I also think a few Michael Jackson and Madonna songs should definitely be on the radio during the 1980's portion of the story, given the immense popularity and regular radio airtime those two had in that decade. If this ended up being possible, I imagine that Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal, Beat It, Bad, and Billie Jean being on the radio in the 80's sections would be a must, Smooth Criminal especially because of how well it suits the series. Madonna's Lucky Star, Burning Up, Like a Virgin, and Borderline would also be perfect for the 80's portion of the game to me. Also mentioned by NPCs and civilians in the game are topical events of the time period, such as the release of the groundbreaking 1973 horror film The Exorcist at the end of Vito's playable portion of the game.
Other music of the 1980's segment when playing as Louis DeAngelo for the remainder of the game includes hits of the era such as Joe Jackson's Steppin' Out, The Buggles' Video Killed The Radio Star, Corey Hart's Sunglasses at Night, Laura Branigan's Self Control and Gloria, The Weather Girls' It's Raining Men, A-ha’s Take On Me, Men at Work's Down Under, Kim Wilde's Kids in America, The Gap Band's You Dropped a Bomb on Me, Culture Club’s Karma Chameleon, Michael Sembello’s Maniac, Twisted Sister's I Wanna Rock and We're Not Gonna Take It, Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive and Bad Medicine, Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible, Rick Astley’s Together Forever, Whenever You Need Somebody, and Never Gonna Give You Up, Cutting Crew’s [I Just] Died In Your Arms, Loverboy's Working for the Weekend, Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) and That's the Way (I Like It), Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now, Daryl Hall & John Oates' Maneater, Aneka's Japanese Boy, Mötley Crüe's Dr. Feelgood, Girls, Girls, Girls and Kickstart My Heart, Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, Huey Lewis And The News' Hip To Be Square, Bill Medley's (I've Had) The Time of My Life, The Police's Every Breath You Take, Whodini's Magic's Wand, Guns ‘N Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle and Paradise City, Tears For Fears' Everybody Wants To Rule The World, Rockwell's Somebody's Watching Me, Regina's Baby Love, Nena's 99 Red Balloons, Earth, Wind, and Fire's Let's Groove and September, Billy Idol's Eyes Without a Face and White Wedding, Rick James’ Give It To Me Baby, Olivia Newton-John’s Physical, The S.O.S. Band’s Take Your Time (Do It Right), Kenny Loggins’ Highway to the Danger Zone, Wham!’s Everything She Wants, George Michael's Careless Whisper, Toto's Hold the Line and Africa, Blondie's Heart of Glass and Atomic, and Mai Tai's History.
**Note that not every single year and moment of the 17 year 1975-1992 section playing as Louis DeAngelo is playable or chronicled. My idea is it would be handled similarly to how the time skips in Mafia 1/Mafia: Definitive Edition were handled. Time skips of two or more years, or in this case, even longer such as 4 years sometimes, the game skipping from 1979 to 1983. This is to keep the game and story length ideal, and not risk it getting boring or repetitive, or going on for too long. Repetition was a big problem in Mafia III even if I still thought it was a superb game, so I think it'd be best to learn from that for the next big entry. The games story will skip ahead and show onscreen only what's significant, similar to the first Mafia game and it's remake, as well as certain aspects of Mafia II. Louis starts his section as a 22 year old fugitive soldato who got picked up by another crew south of the Canadian border, and in the epilogue of the game in 1992, is promoted to the consigliere of the Scaletta crime family at the age of 40, being set to take over the family once Vito and Joe become too old to run the day to day on a regular basis. Louis DeSimone is promoted to don of the Scaletta crime family following Vito and Joe being officially retired as of 2006. They’re both still involved and paid huge amounts of money by Louis out of respect, but keep a much lower profile by then since they have handpicked successors and aren’t worried about where the business is going.
The years chronicled in the main gameplay segments are as follows:
1973
1975
1977
1979
1983
1985
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
Much more of the rural areas and countryside outside of Empire Bay are included than what was available in Mafia II. The way rural environments are handled for this hypothetical Mafia IV is akin to how Mafia: Definitive Edition and Mafia III handled their rural environments outside the main cities, except much larger in scale, given the increased power of the current new consoles such as the PS5 and Xbox Series X. This region is based off of upstate New York and the surrounding areas across multiple states in the Northeastern US, and includes forests, fields, mountains, rivers, lakes, beaches, and small towns. Also included are other cities and towns, based off of other large cities in New York like Syracuse, Buffalo, and Rochester, where other story missions, business activities, and side missions take place, along with smaller notable places like Ithaca, Binghamton, and Utica. The entire states of New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Delaware, Maryland, and Ohio are also included, including places based off of all of their major cities and most of their notable towns in between. Large portions of Pennsylvania are included as well, including Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Scranton. All of the province of Nova Scotia including the city of Halifax, and Large portions of the eastern half of the Canadian province of Ontario are included as well, including cities based off of Toronto, Ottawa, and Niagara Falls. There's even a small portion of Quebec included, including Montreal and the surrounding countryside of the province outside that city, including a few small towns in southern Quebec. The player must pass a quick border patrol check when crossing the US-Canada border in a car or other ground vehicle.
Wildlife is present in the game, mostly to add to the background, scenery, and immersion in rural environments on the map. These are all animals native to the Northeastern US, ranging from white tailed deer, coyotes, bobcats, Canada lynxes, rabbits, hares, groundhogs, gophers, beavers, raccoons, opossums, bats, chipmunks, red and gray squirrels, mice, and rats to more formidable and potentially dangerous animals that may sometimes attack the player, such as grey wolves, black bears, mountain lions, and moose. These last four animals are known to spawn in the mountainous regions, especially in New York, Ohio, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Ontario, including the rural regions based off of the Catskills and the Adirondack mountains. Dogs are present in the cities, towns, and settlements where humans live and keep them as pets, being walked and sometimes found in people's yards. Some are used as guard dogs by enemies and are aggressive towards the player on sight. Domestic cats are also present in the background of residential areas, and both Louis and Vito own them as pets throughout the game in their safe houses, as well as other onscreen characters we see the homes of throughout the game.
Aircraft make their first usable appearance in the Mafia series too, from airplanes to helicopters. Vito cannot use planes or helicopters in his playable 1973 portion of the game, as he does not know how to pilot, being a paratrooper in World War II who never actually flew any of the planes himself. Aircraft are unlocked to use when Louis DeSimone gets his pilot’s certificate offscreen in 1977, and at the end of a chapter set that year, Louis has to fly Vito in a helicopter to a penthouse in Downtown Empire Bay acting as a family safe house, equipped with a helipad. Louis frequently serves as a personal driver and pilot for both Vito and Joe afterwards, having done a lot in his time serving the family to earn their trust and respect.
Melee weapons also make a return from Mafia: Definitive Edition, with even more variety this time. In their respective sections of the game, Vito and Louis may use anything from baseball bats, pipes, shovels, brass knuckles, golf clubs, police batons, switchblades, kitchen knives, bowie knives, ice picks, 2x4s, claw hammers, crowbars, tire irons, chain links, machetes, meat cleavers, pickaxes, hatchets, sledgehammers, to fire axes. This amount of melee weapons is so no matter what environment the player finds themselves in during a mission or any other game activity, there is usually a weapon of some sort nearby. If the player has obtained piano wire, you may also strangle an enemy to death with it from behind as a stealth kill, this being a classic assassination method infamous for being used by the Italian Mafia. Rope can also be found and used for similar strangulation stealth kills, appearing in the gameplay environments where piano wire can’t be found. There is a wide variety of new guns and explosives to use in this concept for Mafia IV, going with the new weapons of the time the game takes place that criminals quickly got their hands on. This includes the SPAS-12 combat shotgun, the Beretta 92 pistol, the AK-74 assault rifle, the mini uzi, the MAC-10 submachine gun, both suppressed and unsuppressed variants, the Beretta 92 pistol, the Taurus raging bull revolver, Glock handguns, the TEC-9 machine pistol, illegally modified to be full auto, the Ruger Mini-14 full auto variant, and even Vietnam war era flamethrowers, which I think is only natural given that as of Mafia III, we already have RPGs and grenade launchers. Late in the game from the 1989 section and onwards, the Benelli M3 combat shotgun becomes available. The Milkor MGL grenade launcher becomes available beginning in the 1983 portion of the game. Attached grenade launchers are also available for the AK-47, AK-74, and M16 assault rifles. More advanced rocket launchers of the 1970’s and 1980’s are naturally included as well.
Free ride makes a return in Mafia IV, with the player having the options to change the weather, time period, and an option to play as Louis, Vito, Joe, Lincoln, or John Donovan. Naturally, a multitude of new free ride missions are available as well.
I previously posted a much earlier and less detailed draft of this on the old Mafia3 subreddit 3 years ago back in 2017 as an idea for a hypothetical Mafia 3 expansion where you play as Vito, but have since updated and revamped it to a possible Mafia IV plot, and fixed any plot holes I noticed and made it much more fleshed out and in depth, and focus on more than just Vito in the end. You may view my original here if you so desire, to compare. https://www.reddit.com/Mafia3/comments/6sldhp/spoiler_mafia_iii_vito_dlc_basic_plot_idea/
Feel free to give me constructive criticism on this, as I encourage this discourse and believe it is integral to growing and improving, to build upon or improve these ideas I've come up with, or say whether or not you think something like this should happen in the future. Thank you for reading!

What you are looking for is..... (Link in the Desc.)5

A Tyson Foods board member was held ransom for $87,250 in December, 2018. Now released, he says Tyson is suppressing police investigations into finding his captors and threatening legal action if he speaks about his abduction.

Myra Kindle is an independent investigative reporter.
Her other reports:

Once Enviable

At six foot one, 41 years of age, and net worth of hundreds of millions, prodigious venture capitalist Dean Banks should be the envy of the world. But he’s not.
Dean struggles to leave his house, says he feels an impending sense of doom, and is prone to sudden outbursts of crying. None of this is unusual for a recovering survivor of a ransom kidnapping, an experience which can test our ability to feel safe in any space afterward.
What is unusual is that since the kidnapping Dean has become a vigorous advocate of free range chicken farms, and now refuses to eat the animal himself. An odd trauma for a survivor to come away with, but one more consequential to Dean, who in 2017 became a member of the board of directors at Tyson Foods, one of America’s largest suppliers of chicken.
Now, facing the possibility of dismissal from the board at Tyson, and angry at the lack of coverage in the media, Dean has agreed to speak on the record for the first time since the incident.
Dean claims Tyson conducted an illegal ransom payment to free him, and that they have humiliated him by disbelieving his account of the kidnapping. Dean also says Tyson played a significant part in shutting down two police investigations into what happened, and that Tyson has been suppressing his speech since he has tried to say publicly that they promote the cruel treatment of chickens.
Based on dozens of interviews with Mr. Banks, representatives from Tyson Foods Inc, and law enforcement in Idaho and Wyoming, as well as documents and correspondence provided by Banks and other sources, this special investigative report by independent journalist Myra Kindle lays out in chilling horror the six day ordeal and subsequent coverup of the Dean Banks kidnapping.

Breaking with Corporate

On a late afternoon on December 12th, 2018, Dean Banks left his winter home in Sun Valley, Idaho. He planned to drive 3.4 miles from his home to a grocery store, a drive he has made many times before.
He never arrived, and instead would not be seen until six days later on December 18th, when he was found severely dehydrated and rambling emotionally outside of a bar in a town close to the border in neighboring Wyoming.
The details of the intervening six days are a topic of dispute between the police, Tyson, and Dean Banks, with each party giving wildly different versions of what happened. What is agreed with no dispute by any party is that Dean Banks has been irrevocably changed.
“An abduction is an extremely traumatic experience,” says Linsey Windsor, adjunct professor at UCLA psychology. “Security is a fundamental human need. An abduction, especially in an area we typically think of as safe, can instill a feeling that we’re never safe. The long term effects of that on a person can be devastating -- their personality can completely change.”
If personality changes are normal, then for Banks it’s his views on raising chickens that have changed.
“We treat them so poorly,” Dean says. “I get that people are going to eat chicken. I understand that’s not going to change. What I don’t understand is why we have to be so cruel to chickens during their short life.”
Dean’s argument is not substantively new. Chicken farms have often been the target of animal rights activists who argue chickens aren’t given enough space to walk, and live most of their life in a dark crowded coops, eating till they’re ready for slaughter.
More complicated for Dean is his view that the company for which he serves on the board promotes animal cruelty.
“I think Tyson plays a huge part in the treatment of chickens,” says Dean. “It’s not even that I think it -- I know it. We’re involved in how farms raise chickens because we’re the main buyer. If we said we’re not going to buy your chickens unless you give them more space to roam, we could change farms all over the country.”
Dean’s views are seldom heard publicly, and aside from a few quickly taken down YouTube videos, this is the first national reporting on the Tyson board member.
Tyson claims they had nothing to do with flagging Mr. Banks’s YouTube videos, and also takes umbrage at Dean’s argument that Tyson promotes animal cruelty.
“Tyson Foods plays no part in how chickens are raised,” Tyson spokesman Eli Hule says. “We are the distribution, and we do that proudly, but we’re not the farmers. We have no say over how chickens are raised.”
While it’s true Tyson owns very few farms themselves and is in mainly a distributor, Tyson works extensively with private farms to set up new chicken operations.
“Tyson doesn’t own the land, but they essentially tell farmers how to run their operation,” says Eduardo Porter, economics reporter for the New York Times. “For example if you want to invest in building a new chicken coop, a commercial bank typically won’t underwrite that loan. You go to a company like Tyson and say you’ll sell them chickens for X many years if they loan you the money to scale up. But in that agreement is the implicit understanding that if Tyson doesn't like what you’re building, say they think more chickens could fit in that coop you want to build, they’ll deny the request. They have incredible control over chicken farms. It’s just indirect control.”
Dean’s explanation for how he could go from Tyson board member to chicken rights activist?
“If you knew what it was like to be a chicken in a crowded, shit covered, dark coop with barely enough room to bend your legs, you wouldn't be asking me that,” says Dean.

Conflicting Stories

Outside a bar in Wyoming near the border of Idaho, Dean yelled frantically, emotionally, till the bar called the police and Dean was sent to St. John’s Medical Center in Jackson, Wyoming.
At the hospital, Dean was treated for dehydration and minor bruising, and then was moved to the mental health ward where he was kept under observation for three days.
Dean says he remembers nothing about how he got to Wyoming, or how he ended up specifically at that bar. For Dean, it’s the intervening six days that he remembers, but was also severely hesitant to talk about at first.
“I’m worried the public will say what Tyson says, what the police say, that I’m making it all up,” says Dean.
He has reason to be worried. Dean’s story is fantastical, and arguably the reason for a lot of his current troubles.
“I can’t deny what happened,” says Dean. “I can only tell you that they gave me the memory implants of a chicken’s life, and it was fucking horrifying.”
Hot and sweating in pitch black darkness with skant enough room to turn his neck, Dean describes his experience as living in “the horror of optimization from the perspective of the cog in the machine.”
“It’s dark. It’s hot. You’re standing on grating that cuts into your feet and you don’t even have enough room to rotate your body,” says Dean. “And then the screams, the never ending screams of a room of creatures that don’t understand what’s happening but know they’re in pain. All the while the smell of feces is just putrid. The chickens are stacked, so the droppings from who was above me dropped onto my face, my body, and again I didn’t have enough room so I couldn't wipe it off. I just wanted to die, but even that was impossible.”
When asked how he understands his experience to be the implanted memories of a chicken, Dean says, “When I was taken, the kidnappers told me that they were going to fill my head with the memories of a chicken that lived and died in a high capacity farm. I didn’t believe them at first, of course, but the next thing my mind is filled with the sense of being something different. Like, just the sense of touch was different, the smell, and then I just felt I wasn’t me, and then the chickens started screaming, I could smell feces, and I didn’t know it at the time -- I mean didn’t understand anything, but when I was recovering at the hospital, I realized the kidnappers hadn’t been lying. They really did what they said they were going to do.”
Neither Tyson Foods nor police in Wyoming or Idaho believe Dean’s telling of his abduction, and have separate views themselves about what happened.
“We are overjoyed at Mr. Banks’s safe return,” says Eli Hule of Tyson Foods. “We are however greatly discouraged by scandalous media attempts to make his ordeal something it is not. It was a kidnapping. He was safely returned and we think that should be the focus right now.”
While Mr. Hule refused to elaborate on what happened to Banks, lawyers for Tyson provided the following statement: “Tyson Foods Inc. is extremely grateful to local law enforcement for the safe return of Dean Banks. In regards to Mr. Banks’s experience, it is our position that inflicted abuse on Mr. Banks should not dictate how Tyson runs its business, which is currently an industry leader in providing delicious, healthy chicken products to more than 250 million Americans every year.”
On the record, law enforcement in Idaho and Wyoming who have handled this case are equally suspicious of Mr. Banks’s story.
“We have no evidence to back Mr. Banks’s claim of being implanted with the memories of a chicken,” says attorney general for Wyoming, Bridget Hill. The Idaho attorney general referred me to Ms. Hill’s statement when asked for comment.
Off the record, local police officers were more forthcoming on their opinions of what happened to Mr. Banks.
“Totally believe him,” says officer Steve of Idaho, who asked I only use his first name. “This type of stuff happens all the time. Drug lords in Mexico put the memories of dogs in their hit men to toughen them up. This is nothing new.”
Another officer from Wyoming, who only agreed to speak anonymously, has another theory: “I don’t know about memory implants, but I’ll tell you that guy was on drugs when we picked him up, psychedelics or something.”
Asked if Dean’s experience could be explained with drugs, Dean says: “I went to college. It wasn’t drugs.”

The $87,250

Why was Dean Banks released on December 18th, 2018? It’s a question the police and Tyson don’t have an answer to, but one Dean readily has a response for.
In Dean’s telling, Tyson was contacted following his kidnapping and asked to pay $87,250 for his release. Dean notes that this request didn’t go to his family (who would have paid it, he says), but directly to Tyson corporate.
Tyson adamantly denies this, whose lawyers state: “Tyson did not pay a ransom for the release of board member Dean Banks, nor were we contacted by Dean’s kidnappers. Any story to the contrary is completely unfounded.”
Police also dispute there ever being a ransom, with AG Hill of Wyoming stating, “It is our position that this was not a ransom kidnapping, but rather an abduction. No money was sought to release Dean Banks, and he either escaped on his own or was released by his captors for reasons unknown.”
The denials by Tyson and police are clear, but there is contrary evidence there was indeed a ransom.
“It wasn’t even 48 hours before a friend of Dean’s contacted me to let me know what had happened,” Martha, Dean’s wife says. “They serve on the board together, and they filled me in on everything Tyson had learned. They said Dean had been kidnapped, but the kidnappers were only asking for $87,250. It was such a small amount that Tyson put the petty cash to pay the ransom the very next day. A few days later, he’s home.”
Martha declined to say who told her about the ransom and the payment, stating: “Do I really want to put another person in the same boat as Dean? Tyson might remove Dean from the board. I don't want that to happen to them too. They were simply trying to console me, let me know Dean would come back safe.”
Tyson has good reason to lie about making a ransom payment. Although prosecutions for it are nearly non-existent, under section 1202 of federal penal code 18, it is illegal to make a ransom payment.
While the legal liability for Tyson might be low, there almost certainly would be a media firestorm over Tyson Foods making an illegal ransom payment, no matter the ethics of the act. Large publicly traded companies will often squash a story unless it’s clearly beneficial to the company’s image.
“It’s a toxic story,” says Dean. “What’s the upside here? Some coverage that Tyson is a good company cause they paid a ransom? For Tyson, there’s no guarantee that would happen. Meanwhile, they know they’ll have to deal with a board member calling their farming practices cruel getting a national microphone. Of course they’d deny the ransom.”

No Investigation

Perhaps the most perplexing detail of Dean’s abduction is, why haven’t the kidnappers been caught?
It is just one question among the many that loom over Dean’s case. Why was he transported to Wyoming? Why, even if it didn’t happen, was he told he would be given the implanted memories of a chicken? Why was his ransom set at $87,250? Did Tyson make the payment?
Police in Wyoming and Idaho claim they are still investigating, but anonymous sources from inside investigating police departments have told me the case was given such low priority that they’re nearly certain it’ll never be solved.
That might be good for large parts of Wyoming and Idaho where many of America’s chickens are raised. A scandal involving Tyson and illegal ransom payments could financially harm thousands farmers and businesses that rely on that industry that Tyson is so central to.
“I think what’s good for the survivor here is going to be bad for the community, so we’re just not going after this one,” says a detective in Idaho who only agreed to comment anonymously.
Meanwhile, Dean and his family are somewhat resigned that Dean’s captors will not be apprehended by law enforcement.
“Justice is hard enough to get when it’s what everyone wants,” says Dean. “But in this case, I think I’m the only one who wants it, so what kind of a chance is that, really?”
In Dean’s telling, Tyson is actively suppressing the police investigation by denying the ransom.
“For fear of cutting into profits from bad press coverage,” he says,” Tyson is willing to let someone who committed a serious crime go free.”
“If we speak about the ransom,” says Martha, “Tyson has threatened to sue on defamation. It’s a risk just talking to you now.”

Wellis Farms

Since I started covering this story in February, I’ve driven countless hours on midwestern roads between Sun Valley, Idaho and Jackson, Wyoming. Along the way I stopped at several chicken farms to learn, first hand, how chickens are kept and raised, and to verify Dean’s claim of arguable animal cruelty at many of these farms.
It was by chance when I was coming back across the border into Idaho that I found Wellis farms, a small operation with extremely talkative farmer that was thrilled that I was asking him questions about how chickens are treated.
“Beyond cruel,” Wellis says, showing me around his farm in an acid washed durag and white t-shirt. “If a chicken could do it, they'd commit suicide in those densely packed coops.”
He’s happy to show me his farm, regularly pointing to the chickens that roam mostly free in a large enclosed area.
“I’m not a vegetarian,” says Wellis. “Hell I eat ‘em, and they just taste better when they’re raised right. When they’re raised as slaves and they know it, they taste bitter. I taste a chicken I can tell you how much room that chicken has to run around. Swear.”
In one corner of the farm is a dilapidated chicken coop. I ask Wellis about it, and it’s the only time his mood sours during the whole tour.
“Hundred grand mistake is what that is,” he says, and refuses to say much more. “It was a project and it didn't work out,” is all I can get him to add.
The tour was nice, and Wellis seems like a genuinely nice guy, but the failed chicken coop did pique my interest.
While not definitive evidence of wrongdoing, I was able to find a series of building plans filed with the local building inspector in Bonneville County, where Wellis Farms is located. Listed publicly for that property is a set of documents for construction of a chicken coop filed in 2011. There are two plans, one from Wellis, and a revised version by the underwriter of his loan, Tyson Foods. Wellis’s plan was a for a modestly packed coop. The revised plan from Tyson called for a chicken coop with eight times the occupancy. The amount for the loan, $87,250.
While perhaps just an amazing coincidence, this information was provided to Tyson, law enforcement in Wyoming and Idaho, and Dean Banks.
Tyson gave no comment when told about Wellis farms. Police stated that they are still investigating but appreciated “citizen efforts.”
Dean was the least ambivalent. After contacting Wellis, Dean said: “It’d be an awful thing if he was the one who kidnapped me, it really would. Because he doesn't seem like such a bad guy.”
Myra Kindle is an independent investigative reporter. She covers tech, law, politics, and other stories that would be impossible to write about in more traditional outlets.

A Comprehensive Guide to Southern Nevada Thrill Seeking and Rollercoasters

Introduction

The guide is meant to service roller coaster enthusiasts in the greater Las Vegas area. I won't be including general Las Vegas tips, or any less traditional thrill seeking activities you may find in Southern Nevada. We're going to hit roller coasters first and then move on to other theme park-like activities. I'll try to cover everything, but if I miss something let me know and I'll update this.
Welcome to Southern Nevada, the southern portion of the state with 0.05 roller coasters per 1,000 sq mi per RCDB. There's not a lot here, but there are a few memorable experiences that provide some credits and some entertainment to anyone. It's very possible to hit all of the credits in one day, but doing this may ruin the experience of some of these places. However, if you have some time in Vegas, and you'd rather have some thrill rides fill your day, here's what Southern Nevada has to offer.

Rollercoasters (From North to South)

Las Vegas Mini Grand Prix
Credits - 1
Transportation - Taxi, Uber, or Rental Car
This small attraction is a little family-centered Go-Kart experience with a small credit.
The coaster is a small little piece of work that serves as a credit at least. I have some fond memories of it from my childhood, but its nothing special. If you are bringing kids, about the ages 5-14, they'll enjoy this entire place, and its a nice escape from the relentless advertisement barrage that is the rest of the attractions.
Keep in mind, this is a good 30 minute drive away from the strip and therefire most of the hotels in town, so transportation can be inconvenient. If you really want the credit though, its still very possible to get there.
The Adventuredome
Credits - 2 (R.I.P. Miner Mike)
Transportation - Foot, Uber, Taxi
Ah, The Adventuredome. The infamous indoor amusement park on the strip. This place is good for almost all ages, and even as an adult, one can still find enjoyment here for some part of a day. Getting here is easy, but if you're walking and stayed at a hotel near the heart of the strip, it will be a significant walk. However, its totally possible to walk here even from the New York New York casino, where another major roller coaster resides.
Canyon Blaster - The one word I would use to describe this coaster is charming. Its surprisingly smooth and holds up well for its size. Its layout is a little unconventional, but the novelty of it weaving throughout the rest of the park is intriguing. As for seats, the front will give you the most out of the near miss elements, while the back gives you a surprising amount of force. However, the difference isn't enough for me and I prefer the front.Not the best coaster in the world, but for an indoor Arrow, its really good.
El Loco - For the most recent coaster to be added to the dome, S&S brought a fun little coaster that takes advantage of the space. In an indoor park, there's no room for air time or huge drops. What there is room for is lots of inversions and nausea. This coaster uses its space really well, and is actually very entertaining to sit and watch. Once again, the novelty of it all being inside is really effective, and if you go to the Adventuredome at night, you'll get a unique ride on this coaster that may be memorable. However, I am a relatively weak stomached person, and the coaster started to get my lunch up after 4 or 5 rides. I have talked to more average people in terms of vulnerability to nausea, and they say its fine for quite a few rides in a row. Just keep that all in mind if you find yourself in a position to marathon this thing. As for seats, there are only four, so my recommendation would be to try to ride in the front two, but it doesn't really matter. Overall, a neat coaster with a lot of novelty which uses its size and space really well.
There are a couple flat rides in the dome, such as a Zamperla Disco, Morgan's Chaos, and Morgan's Inverter. These are cool as well, and definitely unique as there are not many indoor attractions like these. Other than that, the rest of the park is kiddie rides and stores. The park is actually quite fun to just stroll around, as the decorations and rockwork really cover the whole park and give the done some charm. I wouldn't recommend eating in the park, and you can buy a wristband for all day and leave in the middle, so take advantage of that.
The Big Apple Coaster
Credits - 1
Transportation - Foot
Perhaps one of the most infamous coasters in the world and the last Togo built coaster in the United States, the Big Apple Coaster is an experience, I just can't say it's the best experience. The potential this coaster had was astounding, but the cheaply constructed final product leaves much to be desired. Getting here is very easy from almost every hotel on the Strip, and once inside just ask someone to direct you to the arcade and you'll be on your way. The casino floors are purposely confusion, so guidance may be necessary to find the thing.
The actual coaster is okay. I don't think its as bad as everyone says, and I'll try to make my case here. Just try to not wear the VR, as those goggles make this this as bad as everyone says. You can ask the attendant to omit you from the VR, but I can't guarantee anything. Anyway, here's my defense of this coaster if you're not wearing VR:
While the overall experience of this coaster may be slightly uncomfortable and jarring, the main takeaway from this coaster is the view of the strip and uniqueness that make this coaster especially memorable. Few coasters swoop over a crowded parking lot next to one of the busiest streets in the city. Few coasters give you aerial view of a bustling downtown entertainment epicenter. And few coasters are as memorable as this one. In fact, the uncomfortable restraints and unusual layout contribute to this overall memorability. I find the front row makes the ride a little less jarring, and if you can, a night ride is a really cool experience. Yes, the coaster may not be the best experience and give the best forces, but its a unique coaster that is worth at least a day ride and a night ride.
Buffalo Bill's Resort and Desperado
Credits - 1
Transportation - Uber, Rental Car
Driving all the way out to the border between Nevada and California will bring you to Buffalo Bill's Resort and the coaster that towers over it. It pretty much just the coaster out here, but this a motion simulator and I think a log flume, but I'm just going to cover Desperado. Getting out here is very troublesome, and its a good hour drive from the strip center. I would recommend renting a car and driving it out here for about half the day. Desperado is decent to marathon and I don't think I've ever waited for it.
The actual experience of Desperado is better than you may expect. It was actually my first coaster over 200ft, and as a hyper it stands up well enough. The air time is not great, but for a coaster in the middle of the desert its good enough. This coaster is really saved by how few people ride it; being able to ride it over and over is one of the best parts about it. Other than that, there's not much to say. Its okay, not great, kinda average. But in a state like Nevada, average is about all one can ask for.

Other Attractions

There are a couple other experiences that are in the same genome as theme parks. No credits here, but theme park goers may find some enjoyment from these places.
Wet n' Wild & Cowabunga Bay
These are the seasonal water parks servicing the Las Vegas area. They're not extreamly large, but for small parks they're a nice place to chill in the summer. You could easily spend all day at one of these and kids will enjoy they're time. The differences are not very many between these two. I find that, in general, Wet n' Wild is cleaner and better kept, so if you can only visit one from the strip, that would be my recommendation.
The Spring's Preserve
This is a large nature reserve and park which is not far from the strip. If you wan't an escape from the consumerism center of the strip, its a relaxing place. It very child-oriented, but it can be relaxing to just meander and explore. There are several buildings that act as museums and historical centers so if its a hot day, don't worry. Overall, a calm center just off of the downtown area that is nice and quaint.
The Stratosphere
Finishing off with actual thrills, the stratosphere is a tall building with four main attractions at the top. Here's the website from the building for pictures of all three thrill rides. All three of these rides are very crowd oriented and if you don't have any sort of fear of heights they're really just children's rides high in the sky. The view from the tower is nice and the other attraction, bungie jumping off top, is over priced for the experience. I would come up here if you really want to either see the view or hit the rides, other wise it will be a mundane and disappointing experience. I do have to sing the praises of the restaurant at the top. If you have the means to eat there, it's worth it.

Conclusion

Southern Nevada is not a thrill seeker's paradise, but the region does have some nice attractions and a handful of credits for coaster enthusiasts. If you're in the area and are interested in some non-night time activities, these might be for you. The future is not looking great for roller coasters in Southern Nevada, but who knows, some wealthy individual may just bring some thrills to this great desert.

For Two Years a Former University Student Has Set-Up Unusual Protest Demonstrations in Buffalo, New York - No One Is Still Quite Sure What He’s Protesting

Myra Kindle is an independent investigative reporter.
Her other reports:

Ström in a Storm

When Simon Ström locked himself out of his dormitory at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo in 2016, he thought it a minor inconvenience.
It didn’t dawn on him that with nearly the entire campus away for Thanksgiving break and a fast approaching storm incoming, in the next six hours he would freeze, his heart would stop, and he would be considered dead by the EMTs that found him.
There’s a remarkable story in Buffalo, New York about Simon Ström and his unlikely recovery from that event. It’s a story of the remote chances of success doctors faced when they wrapped Simon’s body in heating pads, slowly raising his core temperature from 64 to 98 degrees. It would detail the doctor’s astonishment when Simon recovered, and their amazement when he suffered no brain damage. It would cheer at the miracle that Simon was released from Mercy Hospital only two days after EMTs thought he had died, and it would reflect on the new university rules put in place to avoid such an accident from happening again.
That story, while incredible, is not entirely unique, and it is not this story.
This is the story of how a former SUNY Buffalo student has startled administrators and disturbed students with his unusual, unique, and often horrifying one-man campus protests.
Based on interviews with Mr. Ström, students, teachers, and officials at SUNY Buffalo, and supported with documentation and email correspondence, independent investigative reporter Myra Kindle, for the first time, tells the tale of how an unassuming student nearly brought Buffalo administrators to their knees, and how he has alarmed hundreds of students in the process.

Fed Up

Once known for his near-death frozen experience, Simon Ström is now known around campus for his disturbed antics. Students have adapted in their own way, ignoring him, avoiding him -- some even say they spend less time on campus because of him. With such a disturbance, the university decided they needed to step in.
This past January, Buffalo took the drastic step of expelling Simon from school. The SUNY Buffalo administration says that this action was not taken to deter Simon from protesting on campus, with one official saying, “The school can’t stop Mr. Ström from protesting in public space. However now that he is no longer a student, he will not be allowed entry into most buildings. He was expelled because of misusing the university facilities -- this is an appropriate response.”
Simon understands the university’s position. He even understand the idea that Buffalo wants to expel him for what he’s done. His issue, he says, is the university had another reason to expel him -- to leverage Simon’s immigration status against him.
The university adamantly denies this, and also believes the extent to which Mr. Ström’s demonstrations are bothersome to campus has been overblown.
“SUNY Buffalo did not take the choice to expel Mr. Ström lightly,” says Debra Wheeler, a State University of New York spokeswoman. “We understand how students visas work -- we know how serious an issue it is to be expelled and what that does to someone’s immigration status. In Mr. Ström’s case, it was the only solution to a very serious behavioral issue that just couldn’t be handled appropriately by law enforcement. Considering his behavior, I would’ve recommended this action in 2018 or earlier. In regards to student reaction, we’re glad that students at Buffalo have taken the demonstrations in stride. I know of no incidence of a student refusing to come to school simply because of Mr. Ström’s protests.”
The administration says they are not trying to use Mr. Ström’s immigration status against him, and that student life has been largely unaffected by Simon’s protests. On both points, there is notable evidence to the contrary.
Records show that, while the university may have expelled Simon for behavioral reasons, calls made to police about his continued protests regularly ask officers to check his immigration status -- something only the university could know about, claims Mr. Ström.
In addition, on the record interviews demonstrate that dozens of students, if not more, have been bothered or troubled by Mr. Ström’s behavior.
One student, commenting anonymously, said: “When he was regularly going to campus, I tried not to study at the library. I was too afraid I would run into one of his art exhibits, or worse, actually see him when he was doing one of his protests.”
In many accounts of Simon’s behavior on campus, students describe living-art performances that include elements of disgust or danger. In regards to his exhibits, students say many were murals dedicated to torture.
Alex Turner, a junior, said of Simon’s exhibits: “They were really messed up. They weren’t like album covers -- they were like legit detailed depictions of suffering. There was one time he dropped a twelve foot skinny poster from the second floor library-window. It was a picture of a woman burning at the stake, but super detailed and showed her body already mostly burnt, the flesh falling off. It was really not cool.”
Consistent in the opinions of students who have witnessed Mr. Ström’s demonstrations or seen his exhibits, is the notion that no one is quite sure what he’s demonstrating against, for, or trying to raise awareness around.
Commenting on the issue, Alex Turner echoes a common sentiment: “I really don’t understand what he was doing with the exhibits and the protests. Everything dealt with torture and depictions of hell, and he mentions the Davis building sometimes in person. It’s a shame --I heard Simon used to be this really smart kid, like a genius, but whatever he’s doing now -- he’s totally lost it because it makes no sense.”

School Strategy

Simon Ström is 22. He wears an old “Coachella” t-shirt from high school, has medium size gauges in his ears, and ‘vapes’, incessantly.
Simon is also an undocumented immigrant. Originally from Sweden, until this past January he held an F1 student visa provided to him by SUNY Buffalo. Now that he has been expelled, he needs to return home or faces possible arrest or deportation.
Simon has complicated feelings on the issue. He believes that the administration may have been right to expel him -- he admits his behavior is bothersome -- but he says that now that he is an undocumented immigrant, university officials have been using that as a tactic to stop him from protesting.
“They always called the cops on me,” says Simon. “But now when the cops come, they sometimes ask about my citizenship. That never used to happen before, and no one knows I’m not a US citizen other than the school.”
In response to Mr. Ström’s claim, university president Satish K. Tripathi provided the following statement: “The State University of New York at Buffalo would never inform local police departments about the immigration status of one of our students. We believe that mixing legal status issues with other disturbances or minor crimes would be an abuse of power.”
While the school is adamant officials would never use Simon’s legal status against him, interviews and records show that Simon’s immigration status is regularly mentioned in police reports and emergency service transcripts identifying complaints about Simon.
In one transcript, a 911 caller repeatedly mentions that officers should look at Simon's immigration status when they arrive on the scene:

...
Operator: And what is he doing?
Caller: He lit [inaudible] on fire. Shouldn't [inaudible] …check his passport.
Operator: What was that, ‘mam?’
Caller: I think he’s here illegally. Check his [inaudible] visa.

Simon asserts that phone calls like this are being made by the administration, and that regardless of their reason for expelling him in the first place, using his immigration status as leverage to stop him from coming to campus is wholly inappropriate.
“I’m a tall, red-haired, white guy,” says Simon. “I went to high school in the United States. I speak perfect english, have an American accent -- the only reason you’d suspect I’m here illegally was if you already knew, and only the school knows.”
This is confirmed by several current and former friends of Simon who spoke to me for this story.
“I just assumed he was from Upstate New York,” said one, who agreed to comment anonymously. “Like when he told us his parents lived in Sweden? We got a big kick out of that. We had no idea he wasn’t from the US. Not to sound weird, but he just looks and sounds like everybody else.”
Asserting that a public university is attempting to deport him because of behavior originating in free speech protest is a serious accusation, but Simon stands by his position that it’s the school who is making the phone calls.
Of course, far more than just the administration is upset with Simon, and he himself admits this. When asked if, irrespective of knowledge of his legal status, anyone would possibly want to get him in trouble, Simon responds: “Yes, definitely. I’ve done a lot of things to get attention on campus, and a lot of it really disturbs people.”
Regardless of his legal status, Simon says that for now, he is determined to stay.
When pressed on why, he responds, “I know my demonstrations and exhibits are weird. I know the students and most of the school don’t understand what I’m doing. I understand all that -- but for now, I want to stay, at least until I can get more updates on what’s going on in the Davis building.”

Disturbing Behavior

For two years Simon Ström has conducted demonstrations and built exhibits on Buffalo’s north campus, and for two years students have noticed.
From the dozens of students I’ve interviewed about various incidences and scenes, I find that many are perturbed or frightened by Mr. Ström, and that nearly every student has their own horrifying or troubling demonstration that they were most bothered by.
“I hated the glass suit the most,” says Sarah Hickenlooper, a sophomore. “The guy [Simon] came to campus with shards of a mirror just taped to his body -- like sharp fucking pieces of glass all over. He looked weird, creepy, but I was also just worried him or someone else would get cut. Really, if you approached him in this suit or rubbed your elbow across him, you would come out bleeding. Now imagine, he’s walking down crowded hallways like that -- what are you supposed to do?”
“I still can’t get out of my head the chicken thing,” says Sarah Banks, also a sophomore. “Simon was walking around the south tunnel, and he had a live chicken with him, right? And then you could see he’s feeding the chicken something, and you’re like, ‘ok, weird, but maybe cute.’ But then you get closer and you realize he’s feeding the chicken, chicken-nuggets from McDonalds. The idea an animal would eat itself is super fucked up, but then the chickens just wouldn’t stop eating -- they just kept going and going.”
“How are people not talking about when he lit himself on fire?” says Daryl Jackson, a senior. “He literally lit himself on fire in front of the whole campus right after midterms ended last year. My girlfriend was in hysterics when he did it -- he was only on fire for a few seconds, but it came out of nowhere and obviously really fucked everybody up. I thought it was a terrorist attack or something.”
In terms of causing a disturbance, the incidences are damning, but Simon looks at it another way.
“The glass -- that was a reflection of who we are. The chicken… that was about how accepting we can be of horrible truths if they taste good. The fire -- that was what we’re doing to ourselves,” says Simon.
Elaborating on the fire, he adds, “That was a complicated one. I wore a fireproof suit under my normal clothes, covered myself in gasoline, and then lit myself on fire. I didn't have the mask on so I took a dive in a snow after a few seconds, but there was a good fire on me before I did.
While his protests might seem both extreme and somewhat aimless (at least from the view that you want someone to understand your message), Simon actually presents a much more cognizant case for his actions when you ask:
“Look, I understand someone isn’t going to see my protests and internalize the message behind them -- I get that’s not going to happen. What I’m hoping for is just that maybe someone wants to talk to me afterword, you know? Maybe they ask me what I was protesting about and what it means, and then maybe that starts a conversation.”
When asked if the methods of his protests are possibly disturbing to other students, Mr. Ström says, “Of course it’s disturbing to other students. Of course. But what I have to tell them is fundamentally disturbing -- maybe less so if you’re religious, but if you're an atheist, it’s a big deal. My protest methods only show the seriousness of the issue -- that’s it.”

The Issue

It’s understandable that Simon Ström is something of a social outcast on campus nowadays. He’s no longer a student, but Simon attended SUNY Buffalo for three and a half years. In that time he met people, friends, teachers, and now they want nothing to do with him.
It’s that loss of connection to a school that he nearly graduated from, and the risk he now faces of being arrested or deported, that I think it’s important to preface Mr. Ström’s message with this -- he’s lost his friends, his education, and risked his future, all in advocacy of an idea.
I preface what he says so strongly to emphasize what he’s lost over it, but also for another reason -- I don’t quite understand it.
“My reasons for this doing this are complicated,” he says. “I’m an atheist. I have been an atheist since probably before I was 12. I think a lot of people find atheism young nowadays. I think it’s the internet -- It’s hard to believe in something so dated like religion when the internet just tears that stuff apart for a lot of kids.”
“But then,” he continues, “growing up, I started to have a different take on atheism. Sometimes I’d almost be jealous of my religious friends cause I would think their beliefs gave them a sort of afterlife security that I lacked. Like, be jealous that a friend could go to heaven, or think he was. Meanwhile I’d think, ‘What am I looking forward to... some void?’”
“Even as a kid, I believed so strongly there was no god, that I thought, well, what I am looking forward to when I die then? But as got older, I started not to see it that way. I started to think about a void or nothingness in death as better than being judged by some god I didn’t understand. Maybe other atheists go through that same sort of transition from atheism, to jealousy of religious conviction, and then a rejoice in their atheism. At least, I mean I think atheists must feel the way I did.”
“Well,” Simon continues, “I guess I have good news and bad news about that for atheists. We’re right there’s no god, I mean there’s no dispute after what I saw. But that other part, about how there’s no afterlife? Yea, that’s wrong. There’s someone judging you. There’s going to be someone who is going to determine if you go into eternal bliss or eternal torment -- that’ll happen, atheist or not, god or no god. What's worse? We have no idea of what we're being judged on.”
As I look for an explanation from Mr. Ström, he goes on to tell me his belief is rooted in his experience in 2016 when he nearly died.
“When I took a taxi back to the dorm from the city,” he starts, “that was when I learned about this. I was standing outside the dormitory, trying to get in, realizing I didn’t have my card key with me. I pulled out my phone and it was dead. I was thinking maybe I should start trying to walk somewhere, maybe to a guard station or to the closest gas station, but I see this storm coming, so I stay put. Soon, and I mean like in a few hours, things start to get pretty scary.”
“After a while, I’m standing outside the dorm and I’m thinking, ‘Fuck, if I don't’ see an RA soon, it’s dark, I can't start walking now,’ and I realized I kind of had to stay where I was. So I stay put, waiting to see someone, but no one comes. When it starts to happen, it happens fast. I start to feel a little woozy, not long after, I pass out. Then, something weird happened. I saw something I wasn't supposed to see, and I saw it because I was between life and death."
Mr. Ström describes the space between life and death as a ‘bug’. One that, "gave me a doorway to a truth that religion tries their best to tell, but fails miserably to do so.”
“When I died, when my brain activity was so insignificant that I couldn't be thought of as alive. When you couldn’t feel my pulse and I was cold to the touch, I saw it.” Simon says. “I saw the fabric. I saw the system of it at work. I may not have recognized if it hadn’t been for the research at the Davis building, but I’m telling you, I know what it is, and I saw it."
‘It’, as Mr. Ström describes, is an elaborate sorting system. In fits and starts he can mutter what is said to be a black space, devoid of everything, light, feeling, and meaning. He says in his near death experience he could see the Earth below this void, and from it he saw bodies, countless thousands of bodies. As they rose from the Earth and to the void he was motionless. He could see the people being put into boxes, three of a kind.
In one, Mr. Ström describes children falling into a box. He can’t make out the ages but he describes them as toddlers. The shape of the box, he says, “indescribable in size and distorted in perception.” In the two other boxes he sees men and women of all types falling into one box or the other. “In one, they fall into a scream. In the other, they fall into laughter,” he says.
“There is heaven and there is a hell. There is even an undecided space for children," says Simon. "These places exist but god didn't make them. I saw it because I was between life and death, and I understood them because of my own work."
In reply to how he knows what the boxes are for, 'heaven' and 'hell' as he describes, he says: “Back when I was someone, when I was respected at this school, I designed something just like it. It’s why I've stayed in Buffalo so long -- I hope they know what they’re doing.”

Expert Opinion

It’s clear that to understand Simon Ström and his nearly indecipherable message -- one that, as he says, is of extra importance to atheist’s like him -- I must first learn what he was working on in the Davis building.
There, at the Davis Engineering and Applied Sciences building, in the large well funded state research lab, I’m surprised. When I ask about Simon Ström, I don't hear horror stories about broken glass or feeding a chicken -- I hear legitimate praise and a deep sadness for a respected researcher now gone.
Dr. Alice Han, the lead working on a project Simon contributed to his freshman year, said: “He is deeply missed by everyone. I have very few undergrads working on my team -- it’s one of our most complicated projects. He was a really great help -- a legitimate genius at his age. It’s a shame he could only work with me those first few months of the Fall of 2016. Even in that short time, he built so many fundamental systems necessary to our project. I really don’t think we could’ve even imagined their implementation without him."
In response to if she had heard about Mr. Ström’s unusual protests on campus, Dr. Han says, “Yes, I know. It’s a terrible thing. He’s clearly going through something. I don’t know for sure, and maybe I shouldn’t be saying this because he was once a student -- but around his near death experience, he just couldn’t do the work anymore.”
Dr. Han says the project that Simon and herself were working on is currently ongoing, and that it is one of the most prestigious and well funded at the 30,000 student university.
In response to what the project is, Dr. Han describes it as: “Do you remember that movie, I guess it’s old now, the Matrix? We’re building a simulated world, sort of like that. It’s really cool research, bleeding edge.”
I’m curious and ask Alice what the purpose of making such a city is.
She responds, “Oh, well so many! If we could make the people in the simulation real enough, as in indistinguishable from human and not unknowing they’re in a simulation, we could run all types of experiments that would be impossible to conduct in the real world.”
In one example, she says, “Suppose you want to know what would happen to humans if Earth’s gravity was different. Here, on Earth, we can’t test that. But in a digital world, you could. We could change gravity in our simulated world and see what happens over generations to our digital citizens. We can see if they’d get taller, shorter, or how their bone density is affected.”
Dr. Han proceeds to tell me several additional examples of experiments you could run with a digital world, but I stop her when one example sticks out.
“One idea,” she starts, “and this is one Simon actually helped work on -- to create an afterlife in a simulated world, and then test if the digital people in that world have religions that mimic the afterlife we create."
I inquire further and ask how Simon contributed to the project.
“The experiment on religion wouldn't be possible without Simon’s contributions, actually. He developed the complicated process that moves the conscious minds of these digital people when they die to a digital heaven, hell, or purgatory that we made. Simon figured out a tunneling system -- essentially it lets you move them from the ‘alive’ space to the ‘dead’ space without the digital people ever knowing. Even if they have great scientific discoveries in their digital world, as long as dead is dead and alive is alive, they’ll never become aware of the digital afterlife we made. This is fundamental to test if there's any other way that information can permeate between the afterlife and the living in the digital world.”
A final question for Dr. Han; I briefly describe the three boxes that Simon described people falling into -- I ask her if there's an explanation for where Simon could have come up with his experience.
She says, “Simon actually made a system just like that. He created the three dividing spaces of heaven, hell, and no judgment -- a nicer version of purgatory. Originally it was just going to be a good afterlife and a bad afterlife in our design, but he didn’t feel comfortable having our ‘god algorithm’ making good/bad determinations on children the same way it does on adults. I told him they’re just fake people in a fake world, but he was adamant we build a third space where children wouldn't be judged.”
I inform Dr. Han of what Simon has said to me in interviews about his near death experience. I show her the transcript, and I relay this message because I think I see a connection between what Simon was working on and his near death experience. Dr. Han sees it too.
“Oh my god,” she says. “I never realized how he combined our legitimate research with his near death experience. He must've have dreamed up the whole thing when he was freezing to death, confusing it with what we’ve worked on in the lab.”
I tell her it’s an explanation that is certainly more plausible than Simon’s story.

Home

After speaking to Dr. Han, I sought another interview with Simon Ström.
I believed that, if I could speak with him again and force him to look at the similarities between the vision he saw in his near death experience and the research he was working on at the time, that he would come to the reasonable conclusion that he imagined his experience.
Unfortunately, I could not have that conversion. Simon Ström has already departed Buffalo for his home in Jakobsberg, Sweden.
He does not agree to a phone interview, and instead emails that since he has returned home, he does not want to test his parents by continuing to speak with me for this story.
“They’re already furious,” he writes. “People here learned about the protests I was staging and it’s been a huge embarrassment for me and my family. For right now, I just want to move on.”
When asked why he returned to Sweden, Mr. Ström writes, "It was my decision, my parents encouraged it, but I decided I needed to go back. I finally was able to discover what’s going on in the Davis lab. In short, it doesn't look like they’re going to stop doing what they’re doing, so I have no reason to stay in the States.”
Through email we continue to converse enough that I am able to point out that Dr. Alice Han and him were working on a project with striking similarities to his vision. Bluntly, I tell him I believe he did not witness a godless sorting system of humans in the void he describes, but rather that he was mixing in details from the project that he was working on at the time.
Through email, he responds: “I know that possibility Myra. I’ve definitely considered that my subconscious slipped in details of the project I was working on with Dr. Han. I thought long and hard that maybe what I saw was just my imagination. I know the details are similar in terms of the three boxes. I also pondered that maybe the bodies I saw floating to the sky was what my mind imagined the transition program looked like -- the one I built to move digital bodies from life to death in Han's simulated world.”
“But I reject all that,” he continues. “I believe my vision is real, even if that means I'm saying we live in a simulated world. I know that that's crazy. I know that's unlikely, but I believe it.”
In our last email correspondence, I ask Mr. Ström to confirm that he believes the vision he saw means we, now, live in a digital world. I also ask if he has proof beyond the account of his vision when he nearly froze.
He writes back, “It's a simulation. I don’t have proof exactly, but I have an argument. For all the men and women that have ever lived on Earth -- that might just be around 100 billion. The simulated worlds Dr. Han and I are working on, each one might hold 10 billion people, and we’ll run that experiment tens of thousands of times. Over time, more conscious human beings will eventually live through a simulated world than will ever have lived in a physical one. Well if I'm just another conscious mind, one of many that have lived and died, by all odds, I’m in a simulation. And as an atheist, that scares me. There might not be a god, but if this world is simulated, who knows what programmers have cooked up for after we die? Who knows by what parameters of good or bad or some other experiment we'll be judged?”
Still in Buffalo, I head back to the Davis building one more time to see Dr. Han. What Simon wrote to me has struck something of a chord. I know we’re not in a simulation built by him and Dr. Han, but the idea that one day humans will wake up in those boxes is frightening.
At Davis engineering, I ask Dr. Han about what Simon wrote about, and asked what she’s working on.
She’s silent after I relay Simon’s fear about the probabilistic odds that he is a conscious mind living in a machine.
“It’s a bit silly, but I suppose it’s true,” she says. “First though, to assume there is any chance we’re in a simulated world, you have to know that one could actually be built. But yes, after you know it's possible to build one, it makes sense that over time more and more people would live through a digital existence than a real one. Simply put, more people will eventually have lived in one of these boxes than will have ever lived on Earth."
She continues, “But these emails… they also confirms something else. His demonstrations and exhibits are definitely a poor attempt at a visceral demonstration against what we’re researching.”
She’s standing next to a centerpiece of the research lab, a prototype of their first digital city.
“Simon is worried we’ll be cruel to the people in this world,” she says, staring at the prototype. “I think he’s worried we’ll put them some in a real hell when they die in their digital world.”
I inquire on whether the prototype works.
She says, “Yes, it works. Right now there are 8 billion people living in this box, simulated minds going about their daily lives.”
I ask what the experiment is and if the prototype world does indeed have a heaven and hell.
Dr. Han responds, “Yes, actually. This one is running the experiment that Simon helped work on. Funny, I’m an atheist myself, but in this little box, I guess they really do have to worry about a god to judge them.”
Driving back from Buffalo, a thought runs through my mind. I know that we do not live in the box in Dr. Han's lab, but I wonder, is it possible we could be living in one like it?
If it's the case that by poor probability you are a conscious mind in a simulation, an afterlife wouldn't be made by an all knowing god to punish or reward. It would be made by programmers and designers with intentions unknown, and I think, perhaps the whims of a programmer is scarier than any religion I know.
Myra Kindle is an independent investigative reporter. She covers tech, law, politics, and other stories that would be impossible to write about in more traditional outlets.

Wrestling Observer Rewind ★ Mar. 15, 1999

Going through old issues of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter and posting highlights in my own words. For anyone interested, I highly recommend signing up for the actual site at f4wonline and checking out the full archives.
PREVIOUS YEARS ARCHIVE: 1991 • 1992 • 1993 • 1994 • 1995 • 1996 • 1997 • 1998


1-4-1999	1-11-1999	1-18-1999	1-25-1999
2-1-1999	2-8-1999	2-15-1999	2-22-1999
3-1-1999	3-8-1999

Dave has officially declared the Monday night wars over. Obviously, both shows are still going on. But WWF is riding an incredible wave of success while WCW is free-falling in self-destruction and he doesn't see that changing anytime soon. Sunday Night Heat did a record 5.09 rating, followed the next night by Raw doing a monstrous 6.46. At one point, Raw was more than doubling Nitro's ratings during certain segments of the show. Add in all the mainstream publicity (Sable in Playboy, TV Guide doing another 4-part covers series but only WWF this time, etc.) and just weeks away from Wrestlemania which will undoubtedly be the biggest money event in WWF history and the biggest non-boxing event in the history of pay-per-view, and WWF is simply on fire right now.
On the flip side, there's WCW. For the last several weeks, Eric Bischoff has apparently been on vacation in France (Dave gets an AWESOME line here, saying it would be more appropriate if he was in Rome playing the fiddle). That left Kevin Nash and Hulk Hogan in charge of Nitro this week and Dave says it was possibly the worst TV show put on by a major promotion in history and that Nash and Hogan used the show as a way to get themselves over and went to absurd lengths to basically bury everyone else in the company. When asked about it, Bischoff has basically said he's giving full control to Nash and giving him the chance to sink or swim on his own. Most people feel that Bischoff has pretty much given up and mentally checked out of the company and is looking for a way to get off the Titanic before it sinks. Dave thinks Nitro had to have been designed to fail this week because it takes a lot of thought to actually present a show that terrible, it couldn't have been an accident. He talks about how WCW has had a long tradition of bad booking, dating back to the mid-80s Crockett days where everyone did heel/face turns until the fans didn't care about anyone, screwjob finishes, and the booker pushing himself as the top star (Dusty) and obviously, nothing has changed in the last 10 years. Locker room morale is at rock bottom. Scott Hall is pretty much planning to sit out right now and has talked about suing WCW because it was a WCW employee who ran over his ankle a few weeks ago, injuring him. Benoit, Malenko, guys like them have been forgotten. Bret Hart's burial is complete and he's a midcard nobody now (he worked a 10+ minute match against Van Hammer this week, in case you're wondering). Arn Anderson, one of the top 3 promo guys in the biz, is being phased out. Billy Kidman, arguably the brightest new star in WCW in the last year or so, is barely on TV anymore. Same with Juventud Guerrera, who is the single best wrestler in the U.S. at the moment. Chris Jericho has potential to be the next Shawn Michaels or Ric Flair and he's booked like a nobody and is almost certainly WWF-bound when his contract ends. But we still have nonstop Scott Steiner, Buff Bagwell, Nash, and Hogan. Goldberg is still being booked strong because even WCW isn't foolish enough to totally bury him, but he's not going to be pushed above Hogan (who is turning face) and Dave wouldn't be surprised if they do something stupid like turn Goldberg heel (still a year away from that awful idea). With Ric Flair now being booked as the top heel (at 50 years old) and Hogan as the top babyface, it does nothing to dispel the notion that WCW is the elderly, out of touch company, while WWF is the hot, cool product. People who recently re-signed contracts are wishing they could get out of them and Dave expects nearly anyone who has a chance to go to WWF when their contracts expire will probably make the jump. But aside from all the comparisons of 1999 WCW to 1988 Crockett, Dave says there's one big difference. In 1988, even though morale was bad and the product was suffering, the performers didn't quit. They still tried to put on good shows. But now, in 1999, everyone from the wrestlers, to the announcers, to the front office...all of them have already mentally quit. Almost everyone is just collecting a check and phoning it in at this point and it's never been more obvious. And for that reason, Dave says the game is already over. WWF has won the war.
Vader became the first wrestler in history to win both New Japan's IWGP title and AJPW's Triple Crown title after defeating Akira Taue to win the title recently vacated by Toshiaki Kawada after an injury. Dave says this puts Vader up there alongside Lou Thesz as one of the only wrestlers to hold more versions of major league championships than any other wrestler ever. Vader held the CWA title in Europe in the 80s, which was a bigger deal then than it is now. The UWA title in Mexico (back when they were the top promotion there). IWGP in Japan, 3 times, and the WCW title 3 times, among others. At one point in 1990, he was the CWA, UWA, and IWGP champ all at the same time, which probably makes him the only wrestler to ever hold 3 major world titles on 3 different continents at once.

WATCH: Vader vs. Akira Taue - AJPW 3/6/99

At the latest UFC PPV, Tito Ortiz got into a confrontation with Ken Shamrock, who was cageside for the fight. After Ortiz won his fight against Shamrock's protege Guy Mezger, he flipped off the Lion's Den corner and then pulled out a t-shirt that said "GAY Mezger is my bitch." Upon seeing the shirt, Shamrock jumped up and climbed the cage and started yelling at Ortiz, saying that if he put the shirt on, he would rip his head off and chastising him for poor sportsmanship. Due to UFC being afraid of any negative publicity these days, the camera pulled away from most of it, but Ortiz had to be pulled away and Shamrock nearly climbed into the cage and had to be restrained. For what it's worth, Shamrock has talked about wanting to fight again, but of course, he's still under WWF contract. He's had discussions with Vince McMahon about allowing him to fight, perhaps sometime this year but no word if it's led anywhere. And Shamrock reportedly wants to fight for the UFC title, and doesn't necessarily have any interest in fighting Ortiz, although now there's obviously some intrigue if that fight were to ever happen. But right now, UFC doesn't have enough visibility on PPV to even be able to afford to bring in Shamrock. But there's talk that UFC is making headway with the PPV providers and they seem confident that they may be able to start getting unbanned soon.
The career of Lizmark, one of Mexican wrestling's all-time legends, may have come to a sudden end due to heart problems. He'd been dealing with chest pains recently and finally checked himself into a hospital only to find out it was bad news. Doctors then told him he absolutely could never wrestle again because he would be risking his life. Dave gives a brief recap of his career, talking about him as one of the innovators of out-of-the-ring dives that have become so popular in Lucha Libre ("tope suicida!") and how his son Lizmark Jr. currently wrestles in WCW. He's 49 and had already been talking of retiring anyway but was holding out hope that he would get to wrestle his final match with his son but the WCW/CMLL deal fell through and they're in different promotions so it looks like it won't happen. In fact, Dave says Lizmark's mask is one of the most famous in Mexican wrestling history and that legacy is the reason Lizmark Jr. has repeatedly refused to lose his mask in WCW, which is why they never push him. (Turns out this wasn't the end for Lizmark. He took about 6 months off and then resumed wrestling a slightly lighter schedule but still pretty regularly for the next several years. And in even better news, he did get to wrestle with his son a bunch of times during those years. He ended up retiring in 2013 and died in 2015).
There's a quiet power struggle taking place within AJPW between Mitsuharu Misawa and Motoko Baba, the widowed wife of Giant Baba. Apparently Motoko Baba wants to oversee everything Misawa does while he wants to be left alone to run the company as he sees fit. He also wants to modernize things a bit. If you're recall, Giant Baba wasn't exactly the most in-touch guy when it came to the modern day wrestling business. (This behind-the-scenes power struggle goes on for the next year or so and eventually, Misawa leaves and takes almost the entire AJPW roster and office staff with him to form Pro Wrestling Noah which damn near puts AJPW out of business overnight. But we'll get there...)
For the first time in AJPW history, Stan Hansen won't be part of the upcoming Champion Carnival tournament. Dave explains how in sumo wrestling, when a grand champion can no longer compete at the highest level, they are usually forced into retirement in order to spare them the indignity of losing to low level fighters. AJPW is basically doing the same thing here. Stan Hansen is without a doubt the biggest foreign star in the history of Japanese wrestling but he's 50 years old now and he simply can't hang with the newer generation of stars. And since it wouldn't make sense to push him as a top star anymore, they don't want him in the tournament losing to midcard guys and looking bad. So to preserve his legendary status, they are simply not putting him in the tournament at all.
Shinya Hashimoto was expected to return to the ring for next month's big NJPW Tokyo Dome show but he won't be ready. He had major reconstructive surgery on his nose after getting it shattered to pieces in the Jan. 4 match against Naoya Ogawa and won't be medically cleared in time for the show.
Riki Choshu has announced that he plans to come out of retirement. It's got a lot of people concerned about the financial condition of NJPW because, when he retired last year, Choshu vowed he would never come back unless the company was in such bad shape that they needed him to. Soooo...now he's coming back, so obviously people are questioning things. NJPW is denying that there are any money issues and in fact, most of the wrestlers who recently re-signed were given big raises. But house show business in the last year or so has declined so who really knows. No word on who or when Choshu will wrestle again (must have been some confusion here because Choshu stayed retired for another year-plus before finally coming out of retirement in mid-2000).
Kenzo Suzuki, a former collegiate rugby star, has started training at the NJPW dojo and will likely debut for the company later this year (he doesn't last long in NJPW. Spends a couple of years in WWE during the mid-00s, and then ends up back in AJPW for most of the last decade).
Nobuhiko Takada is still not giving up the dream of being a real MMA fighter and will face UFC fighter Mark Coleman at the next PRIDE show (this ends up being one of the more notorious "fixed" fights in MMA history, with Coleman clearly taking a dive for Takada).
Speaking of Mark Coleman, WCW offered him $50,000 to come in and work a match against Goldberg and to put him over. But Coleman's people advised him against it and then Kevin Nash also shot down the idea, saying what if Vince McMahon offered Coleman $100,000 to double-cross WCW and shoot on Goldberg live on PPV and embarrass the company? Dave says the obvious answer to that would be to tape the match in advance just in case. But either way, it's not happening now.
Legendary retired sumo wrestler Akebono has been denying rumors that he plans to get into pro wrestling now that his sumo career is over (took him a few years, but yeah he eventually becomes a pro wrestler).
Women's boxer Shannon Hall reportedly has an offer to sign with WWF. She's also a former American Gladiator (she does sign with WWF but never makes it out of developmental).
Dave finally saw the A&E Biography episode about Andre The Giant. He says it was a very well-produced fairy tale. Definitely entertaining, but about 80% inaccurate, at least about his wrestling career. There were some good interviews with his family members and friends about his childhood and personal life but as far as his wrestling career goes, most of it was revisionist bullshit.
Legendary women's wrestler Mae Young has been playing the role of Sean Stasiak's mother on Power Pro Wrestling in Memphis. She had a wrestling match with Stacy and, at 75 years old, that makes her the oldest person to have a match that Dave is aware of (Lou Thesz had one at 74 a few years back). She took a few bumps and then faked a heart attack before sneak attacking Stacy with a purse.

WATCH: Mae Young vs. Stacy - Power Pro Wrestling

A 17-year-old kid named Andre Verdun made news in Ventura, CA for his backyard wrestling group where him and a bunch of other kids were having barbed wire matches and jumping off rooftops on each other through tables and whatnot. The principal at Verdun's school was furious at the newspaper that ran the story, saying all they did was give the kids more fame and notoriety by publishing it. Verdun was apparently signing autographs at school after it happened and now there's TV shows wanting to do interviews with them (I googled the guy and it looks like he did a bunch of garbage backyard death match shit for years. There's some videos on YouTube. He also played a big part in a 20/20 piece about backyard wrestling that also interviewed Mick Foley and others. Anyway, looks like this Verdun guy is all grown up and he's a lawyer now. I can't find the local news piece, but here's the 20/20 story from later in the year which features Foley).

WATCH: ABC 20/20 story on backyard wrestling

ECW paychecks are finally starting to clear now that they got the big influx of cash, so morale is better but no one is betting on the future. Even Tommy Dreamer, thought to be the most loyal guy in the company, went on a radio show this week saying that he only has a handshake agreement with Paul Heyman, not a contract, and said that if a serious offer came along from either WWF or WCW, he would take it.
ECW also lost their TV deals in several major cities due to financial issues. Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh TV deals were all lost. They're working on getting Boston back. They voluntarily gave up the Chicago TV deal because they were paying $3,000 a week for TV there but they've never actually run a show there so they decided it wasn't worth the cost. Same for Atlanta, although they're looking for a new TV deal there. Pittsburgh dropped them due to bounced checks.
Tammy Sytch and Chris Candido still aren't being used by ECW. They have told Heyman that they are in counseling and doing an outpatient drug rehab program. Tammy's mother also went to court this week and got a restraining order against her daughter extended (she was arrested a few weeks ago for violating it).
ECW TV this week kept taking pathetic shots at WCW. Once might have been okay but it went on and on throughout the whole show and came off as whiny and desperate. They talked about WCW ripping off ECW's gimmick with the "Uncensored" PPV. Talked about the three-way match between Raven, Hardcore Hak, and Bigelow saying they are using ECW wrestlers for an ECW-style match. And they knocked the Hogan/Flair barbed wire cage match, saying that the match will suck because both guys are 50 year old millionaires who won't take risks and besides, the barbed wire is fake anyway and in ECW they use real barbed wire. Then they showed the famous Terry Funk/Sabu barbed wire match (not bothering to mention that Funk is older than both Flair and Hogan) and basically just spent the whole show knocking WCW.
As if this week's episode of Nitro wasn't bad enough, they also failed to sell out the show in a 12,000 seat arena. It's been a long time since Nitro failed to sell out an arena that size. A few days later, a Thunder taping only drew 4,000 fans to a 15,000-seat arena, which was disastrous (they'll be happy to draw 4,000 fans to any show a year from now). During Thunder, they aired 2 promo videos hyping next week's Nitro and both clips featured Sean Waltman, who has been gone from WCW for over a year now and is, of course, currently in WWF. The wheels are falling off this company.
Also on Thunder, the crowd was chanting "steroids!" at Scott Steiner and at one point, he legit lost his cool and ran into the crowd after a fan, which they had to edited out before broadcast.
In a magazine interview with Goldberg, he was asked his thoughts on WWF and said it was "shock TV" and said he would retire from wrestling tomorrow rather than ever go to work there. Sure thing, buddy.
WWF injury/illness Report: Mankind is dealing with knee issues and will need time off soon. Billy Gunn missed a few shows due to fluid in his lungs and a respiratory infection. Steven Regal is still in rehab with no plans to return soon.
Regarding rumors that Raw will be expanding to 3 hours, apparently it was discussed several months ago back when the ratings war with Nitro was still neck-and-neck. They didn't like that Nitro had a 1 hour head start and talked about adding a third hour to Raw. But now that Raw is dominating Nitro, they don't feel the need to do it anymore, so it won't be happening. Whew. Could you imagine?
Kurt Angle will be sent to Memphis to work for Power Pro Wrestling for a bit before they put him on WWF TV.
Luna Vachon was fired this week due to several separate incidents. She has had a lot of heat with Sable, Marc Mero, Jacqueline, and agent Jack Lanza. She also complained about not getting a push because she wasn't as pretty as Sable (which she also said on TV and it was more shoot than work) and she even challenged Marc Mero to a fight backstage at the St. Valentine's Day Massacre PPV. Basically, she's just been pissing off too many people and none of the other women were comfortable having her around because she's kinda wild, so they fired her. Funny enough, she was booked to face Sable at Wrestlemania and was even booked to win the title, but that's obviously off now and Sable will likely face Tori instead.
WWF is considering doing their own women's wrestling show patterned after the old GLOW promotion of the 80s. They're holding a casting call in Los Angeles next week to bring in more pretty women for it (this never got off the ground but they ended up signing a few of the casting call women to developmental deals).
CBS wants to do a Movie of the Week type deal with Steve Austin playing the same character he played on his recent Nash Bridges episode, since that did such a huge rating. And of course, if the movie does good, it would possibly lead to a full blown spin-off TV series. Austin's guest spot on the show opened a lot of eyes in Hollywood since it did such a big rating, more than even Hogan or Piper could have ever done on network TV.
Public Enemy has a good bit of heat in WWF already, with most people feeling like they don't belong and are out of their league. They had a match against the Acolytes on Sunday Night Heat where both guys (Bradshaw especially) were stiffing the hell out of them. It was reportedly meant to be a message to PE and was approved by the office (yeah this match is BRUTAL and pretty much ended PE's run in WWF).

WATCH: The Acolytes beat the fuckin' brakes off Public Enemy

Sable has been making the media rounds to promote her Playboy issue. She was on Howard Stern this week and will be filming a role for La Femme Nikita next month. She was also interviewed by the New York Daily News and had this to say in regards to WWF's product: "As a responsible parent, I choose not to let my child watch it (Raw). My child is very young. She has a bed time and she's in bed when our show comes on. To me, that's being a responsible parent. Ultimately, it's the parent's decision. If you do not wish your child to watch the WWF, change the channel. It's not our place to put on a show that's supposedly for your children. It's your place as a parent to monitor what your children watch. Are they saying it's not okay to see the characters we play beat up each other but it's okay to have your child watch a movie where a famous actor blows away 100 people with an M-16?" When asked if she felt her character is degrading to women, Sable responded, "I feel I'm being a strong, stand-up woman. People don't have to like what I do or agree with what I do because they don't have to live my life. I would much rather my daughter when she grows up, do what she wants to do because she wants to do it, not because of what someone else thinks." When asked about turning heel recently but still not getting booed, Sable pointed to her chest and said, "Why would they boo this?"
The idea with Jim Ross acting like a heel lately is because they want to transition him into being Steve Williams' manager and also because they're trying to transition Michael Cole into the new main announcer for Raw. However, Ross' promos had the opposite effect and got over huge and he got big cheers. So they've dropped the heel act but the plan is still for him to do the talking for Steve Williams and there's no plans for him to replace Michael Cole anytime soon.
Remember that hotel and casino that WWF bought in Las Vegas? Well, the plan is to tear it down and rebuild since the building isn't right for what they want (they want to be able to hold shows in it, but the structure isn't built for it). Anyway, whenever they do finally demolish it, there's been talk of turning it into a wrestling angle and having Austin press the button, with the storyline idea being that Austin just destroyed a multi-million dollar piece of property that Vince owns (didn't happen but that would have been awesome).
Someone writes in and chastises Dave for being so mean to WCW. The guy basically says, yeah WCW sucks right now but do you have to keep ridiculing them for it? Someone else writes in and shits all over Mick Foley, saying he's a glorified stuntman and doesn't belong in a wrestling ring and he hates this new era of jumping off cages and crashing through tables and all that stuff. He wishes someone with a lot of money would come along and promote wrestling the way it used to be in the good ol' days. He signs his name "Duane Mason" but I know a Jim Cornette letter when I see one!

MONDAY: WCW Uncensored fallout, a look at how many world titles Ric Flair has actually held, Shane Douglas and Flair take shots at each other in interviews, and more...

In 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was losing more than 120 informants a year to Russian KGB. by 1981, that number had dropped to just 10. Now, a former intelligence agent is raising alarm that the wildly unorthodox methods once used to protect Russian sources could pose a devastating new threat

Myra Kindle is an independent investigative reporter.
Her other reports:

A Career Intelligence Agent

In retirement, Kurt Wexler, 84, is like the rest of us.
He likes nothing more than spending his days spoiling his four grandchildren, catching up on old hobbies he’s missed, and volunteering at Saint Stephen's Episcopal Church near his home in Richmond, Virginia.
In his career, Kurt Wexler was nothing like the rest of us.
He was one of just three men responsible for coordinating the complicated web of Russian informants in Moscow during the late 1970s and mid 1980s.
He authorized bribes, covered up murders, and threatened women and children, all in the name of protecting vital sources of information necessary to the United States during the Cold War.
“I laugh a bit at the whole waterboarding issue,” says Kurt. “It’s very serious, of course I know, but also, we didn’t have congressional oversight to deal with, so it’s just a bit funny to me. What stopped us from doing something we ought naught do was the thought it might provoke nuclear war. You know, that was our oversight.”
Mr. Wexler is not the type of former government employee to speak to the press. During our five interviews, he on multiple occasions made comment that he was only speaking to me as a matter of last resort.
But then, why speak at all?
Kurt is worried. Since the April, 2018 expulsion of US government personnel all over Russia, he says the methods, procedures, and equipment used to protect informants during the Cold War is under virtually no supervision.
“A great liability is sitting in in the middle of Moscow and I don’t think anyone is there to look over it,” says Kurt. “It absolutely terrifies me when I think about it.”
Kurt adds that this is not political, saying, “the politicians don't even know.”
Based on interviews with Mr. Wexler, former and current government officials, and supported with documentation provided by Mr. Wexler, independent investigative reporter Myra Kindle, for the first time, shares details of the highly unorthodox methods used to protect Russian informants during the Cold War, and presents what’s at stake if it goes unprotected.

The Soviets that Kept America Safe

Some did it for money, others for a chance at a life in America, and others still simply on moral grounds. But regardless of their motivations, informants have been a central pillar to US intelligence agencies for as long as those agencies have existed.
“Informants are both how we get new information, but also how we confirm what we think we already know,” says Peter Mattis, a former CIA analyst. “We’d essentially be doing a lot more guesswork and would lack a lot of confirmation of details without informants. They’re essential to rigorous intelligence work.”
Mr. Wexler declined to name any specific information that he collected through informants during his time in Moscow, but said: “It ranged on level of importance depending on how important the source was. It could be as mundane as how much sugar an officer likes in his coffee, or as serious as a planned assassination attempt on a US ally.”
Opposite Kurt, and trying to root out his web of informants at every chance was the Soviet secret police, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or as they’re better known, the KGB.
With more than 60 years of secret police programs under its belt, and with new powers granted to them in 1978, to say the KGB had absolute power on the streets of Moscow is still an understatement.
“They could do, and did do, whatever they wanted,” says Kurt. “They had a city gripped in fear. More than just wiretaps, they had access to eight million people, nearly all of whom would rat on their neighbors, friends, family. To be an informant was just an incredible risk, but those that did it, did it regardless.”

An Incredible Risk

On October 4th, 1979, the body of 21 year old Natalia Kozlov was discovered near the Khruscheva apartment buildings in West Moscow. She had apparently fallen from her fifth story apartment.
On October 12th of the same year, two men were found shot dead near the Brateyevo district‎. The gunshot wounds were so severe to their faces that they were never identified.
One week later on October 19th, the body of a six year old girl was discovered floating in Moskva River. It would later be determined that the girl’s father had been shot and thrown off the Borodinsky bridge, and that the girl had died from hypothermia after going into the river to try and rescue him.
While Kurt refuses to confirm any of these deaths were related to his informants, his eyes water as I read aloud about the young girl.
“As soviet citizens, they were supposed to be my enemy,” Kurt says, “but I cared for them like my own brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces. If you were my informant, I did everything I possibly could to protect you.”
In 1979, Kurt’s options to do that were limited.
“Secrecy was our best tool,” he says, “but in a city with eyes and ears everywhere, that can only get you so far. Sometimes, we had to resort to almost KGB type tactics. We would bribe, we would threaten. On one occasion to protect one of our highest valued informants, I authorized the murders of his cleaning lady and driver because I thought they had found something and might go to the police. I’m not proud of everything we did, but we did it to protect Americans and more immediately, the Soviets trying to protect America.”
When reached for comment, the CIA denies that Mr. Wexler ever worked for the agency, however other sources were able to confirm he was an employee of the State Department from 1960 to 1997. Mr. Wexler also provided documentation to this effect.
In regards to the methods used by Kurt, the CIA provided the following statement: “US intelligence agencies do not disclose intelligence gathering practices, however Mr. Wexler’s descriptions are not accurate.”
Off the record, several former intelligence officials tell me Kurt’s description is wholly consistent with what they understand were tactics taken in Moscow around that time.

The Game Changer

It started with suspicion of betrayal.
Mr. Wexler’s clandestine activities were just one of three prongs. He had two co-equal partners that ran their own informant rings, and for security reasons, Kurt was unaware of the informants working for his partners, as were they left in the dark about informants working for Kurt.
They were a team, but a disjointed one, compartmentalized for security in case any one of them were compromised.
In the summer of 1980, it began to look to Kurt that both his partners were betraying their mission.
“We don't share information about informants,” says Kurt, “but we were supposed to be sharing safety methods and procedures. My two partners had lost zero informants in the first six months of 1980 and they refused to tell me why. Moscow has always been one of the most dangerous cities for informants, and yet they cracked the code to gather information safely and refused to discuss it.”
Kurt saw a likely explanation -- they had been compromised.
“I didn’t speculate as to why. It could have been blackmail, or money, or just plain ‘ol ideological defection,” says Kurt, “but something fishy was going on. I figured they had to be working with the USSR.”
Kurt adds, “The stakes were enormous. They could have been feeding US intelligence bunk information for months.”
Both the CIA and State Department refused comment on the subject of the number of informants lost in Moscow during this time period and whether or not it had changed. A representative at the State Department however wished to add: “The US State Department is not a spy apparatus of the United States.”
Off the record, current and former intelligence officials tell me Moscow stands alone as the safest city for informants feeding information to the US.
One official who agreed to speak anonymously said: “Around the early 80s there was a massive reduction in the number of informants being killed around the Moscow area. That trend continued all the way through the end of the Cold War, the 1990s, and even today.” He added, “It’s completely contradictory to how dangerous the city is for other enemies of the Kremlin.”

Spy vs Spy

By August of 1980, Kurt had had enough.
Working with a small group of his closest confidants, he set up an elaborate string operation on his two partners that had refused to share on why their informants were no longer being targeted. The operation revealed that his two partners had been meeting at the same location every two weeks near the heart of Moscow.
“There are more than 800 safe houses and cache deposits used by US intelligence all around Moscow,” says Kurt. “Once I figured out they weren’t going to any of them, it became much more likely in my mind that they had defected.”
In late September, he made his move when he personally followed the two men. Accompanied by three confidants, and all armed, Kurt was mentally prepared to kill one or both of his partners.
“We had staked out the apartment complex they were visiting for the better part of a month,” says Kurt. “We were certain that to the specific apartment they were going to, no one but them had ever come in or out. It was thought the apartment was used as a dead drop location, and that information, money, whatever, was being passed through one of the adjacent apartments. With just the two of them in there, we were pretty confident we could take them in, but if it came to it, we were ready to shoot too.”
The night would end without an intentional murder, but one would be attempted.
Before Kurt and his armed confidants got to the right floor, his partners were already standing at the top of the stairs outside the apartment.
“They shouldn’t have known we were there,” says Kurt. “But as we were climbing the stairs, we saw they had their guns thrown on the ground and their arms raised above their heads.”
Kurt’s eyes well as he takes a moment to describe the improbable fate of one of the three armed confidants he brought with him.
“The man to the right of me,” says Kurt. “I don’t know, maybe he thought it was an ambush when he saw the partners give up so easily, but he tried to fire towards the top of the stairs. I swear I heard the trigger pull but there was no bullet. The man, the one that fired, instead he just disappeared, just faded, completely gone.”
The inexplicable disappearance of the armed man could not be confirmed by any sources other than Mr. Wexler, however Kurt says it affected everyone that saw it.
“It calmed a tense situation,” says Kurt. “My two partners still stood at the top of the steps, looking down now at us three men. They made clear they wanted to surrender, that they meant us no harm, and that they didn't make the other man disappear. We found trust then, I don't know how, but we found it.”
Their surrender however, was conditional.
“They wanted me to join them in the apartment,” says Kurt. “They asked I take their guns and send the two armed confidants that remained back to the embassy. I reluctantly agreed. I didn’t have proof beyond my suspicions they had defected, and with no weapons and no one else in the apartment, it seemed a low enough risk for me to take it. On top of that I had just lost a close buddy of mine to seemingly no cause whatsoever. I needed to know what was in that apartment.”
Kurt’s says his curiosity and the risk he took would lead to the single biggest payoff in his career in spycraft.

The Omnipotent Source

The interview process for Mr. Wexler has been among the most difficult I’ve ever conducted.
He omits names, he leaves absent details, and the information he does share, it is nearly impossible to verify.
This is perhaps most exemplified in Mr. Wexler’s severe reluctance to discuss the apartment his two partners had been visiting during the first six months of 1980, and the scant evidence he is able to provide that it even exists.
What Mr. Wexler will tell me is that inside the apartment they discovered a source that knew everything their informants did, but could relay that information safely.
“The source,” Mr. Wexler says, “a very old man who knew our informants and everything they knew. We would meet every two weeks in that apartment for the next eight years, till he passed and a new man replaced him,” says Kurt.
Asked if he ever confirmed the information with the informants themselves, Kurt says: “That would have been too dangerous at the time, but yes, I did. Years later in the late ‘90s after the USSR fell, I contacted all the informants the old man referenced - I spoke with all of them. They confirmed everything, contextualized it, and even shared more.”
Confirmation of Mr. Wexler’s details have proved impossible. Both off an on the record US intelligence officials tell me that either such a room with such a source doesn’t exist, or that if it does, it is such a closely held secret that only on the ground intelligence in Moscow knows about it.
One official questioned why such an incredible source would only be used to protect Moscow informants, saying: "What's the harm in using such a source for everything, and what's so special about Russian informants that they take priority?"
The only documentation Mr. Wexler was able to provide for verification is a an old Polaroid of an old man, the one he claims was the source in the room. The photograph however is so faded that the man in the photo could be any older man. Mr. Wexler could pass for the man in the photograph, for example.

Fear of a Date

There are obvious security concerns about having a room with an omnipotent source in Moscow go unprotected, but this is not Mr. Wexler’s fear. He trusts the source is allied to US interests, or at a minimum, interested in protecting Russian sources that give information to the US.
Kurt’s fear is much more specific, as he claims that if by January 3rd, 2020, the US State Department does not have adequate resources applied to that room, “armageddon will come for us all.”
When asked for comment, both on and off the record officials tell me the January 3rd, 2020 date has no significance within the intelligence community, however Mr. Wexler is adamant.
“There are two things I know,” says Kurt. “One, I die in 2028 at the ripe old age of 93. Two, the existence of everything won’t matter if we’re not using that room by January 3rd, 2020. Paradoxes kill. I’ve seen it.”
Intrigued, I ask Mr. Wexler if he believes a ‘paradox’ killed his confidant on the stairs in 1980. He responds, “Yes”, and to which I ask: “Well, what caused that ‘paradox’ then?”
Mr. Wexler has not been able to provide an answer.
Myra Kindle is an independent investigative reporter. She covers tech, law, politics, and other stories that would be impossible to write about in more traditional outlets.

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Wrestling Observer Rewind ★ Mar. 15, 1999

In 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was losing more than 120 informants a year to Russian KGB. by 1981, that number had dropped to just 10. Now, a former intelligence agent is raising alarm that the wildly unorthodox methods once used to protect Russian sources could pose a devastating new threat

A Career Intelligence Agent

The Soviets that Kept America Safe

An Incredible Risk

The Game Changer

Spy vs Spy

The Omnipotent Source

Fear of a Date

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Exploring New York New York Hotel & Casino 2019 - YouTube