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When James Brown died on Christmas Day 2006, he left behind a fortune worth tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars. The problem is, he also left behind fourteen children, sixteen grandchildren, eight mothers of his children, several mistresses, thirty lawyers, a former manager, an aging dancer, a longtime valet, and a sister who's really not a sister but calls herself the Godsister of Soul anyway. All of whom want a piece of his legacy
The day he buried his mama in the big cemetery on Laney Walker Boulevard, in the row where he'd buried his daddy and his third wife, too, James Brown draped an arm around Roosevelt Royce Johnson's shoulders and pointed at a plot of unturned earth.
"Well, Mr. Johnson," he said, "that's my spot right there. What you gonna put on my headstone?"
Johnson grunted. Mr. Brown talking foolish, headstones and all that. Like he might actually die someday. What's a man supposed to say to that?
He'd known Mr. Brown almost his whole life, since he was a boy, 12 years old, fetching coffee for the disc jockeys at WJMO 1490, a soul station in Cleveland. The jocks knew Mr. Brown because Mr. Brown made it his business to know the people who could play his records on the radio and keep making him rich. He'd check in with them when he came to town, hang out for a while. Easy promotion, just James Brown working, always working, at being James Brown.
That's how Roosevelt met Mr. Brown, through the deejays, in the mid-'60s. They told him they were going to meet a man, take him shopping, asked Roosevelt if he wanted to come. He thought it was odd when the jocks drove out to Burke Lakefront Airport. No stores out there. But there was a private plane. The hatch opened, and a little man with an improbable swoop of hair climbed down the steps. A black man. Blew Roosevelt's mind. A black man with his own plane. Damn.
Mr. Brown asked him his name, and he said, "Roosevelt, sir."
"Oh, you got manners," Mr. Brown said. Manners were important to Mr. Brown.
Then they all went to King's Menswear so Mr. Brown could buy some silk shirts. "Stay with me," he told Roosevelt, "and hold my coat." Which he did. Mr. Brown gave him four $20 bills that day, and whenever he came back to Cleveland to play Gleason's or the arena downtown, he'd send someone to find that polite kid who'd held his coat. That's what Roosevelt Johnson did for years, hold Mr. Brown's coat.
When he got older, Mr. Brown put him on a Greyhound with a crate of records to hump around to R&B stations, and when he got older still, Mr. Brown took him on tour. ROOSEVELT ROYCE JOHNSON, his business cards read. PERSONAL ASSISTANT TO MR. BROWN. Johnson would lay out Mr. Brown's pajamas at night and iron his clothes in the morning and make sure he had an aspirin with his breakfast and fifty milligrams of Viagra before every show. ("It wasn't a sex thing," Johnson says. "He thought it gave him extra energy.") He bought Mr. Brown weed in Amsterdam, and he brought Mr. Brown Gatorade when his legs cramped in the morning. He traveled the world with Mr. Brown and sang backup, too, right onstage with the Godfather himself.
By the time Susie Behling Brown was laid to rest in the winter of 2004, Johnson had been with Mr. Brown for forty years. Mr. Brown was an old man by then, almost 71. His hair was bone white under the black dye, and he had cancer on his prostate and sugar in his blood. But he was still working, still touring, still paying Johnson $3,300 every week on the road.
What you gonna put on my headstone?
"I'm not gonna put nothin' on it," Johnson said. "I'm gonna let you put something on mine, 'cause I'm gonna leave you behind."
Which didn't happen, obviously, because Roosevelt Johnson is still here to tell stories about Mr. Brown, who up and died not quite three years after his mama, on Christmas Day 2006. But there's nothing on his headstone, because there is no headstone. Mr. Brown is not buried in the big cemetery on Laney Walker Boulevard, nor is he in the shade of the oak trees next to his South Carolina mansion or in the red clay on the slope above his pond.
More than a year after he passed, Mr. Brown is in a temporary crypt surrounded by a fence outside the house in South Carolina where one of his daughters lives. "Like a pet," Johnson says. "That's something you do with a dog—put it in the backyard."
Except Mr. Brown is actually in the front yard. A minor point. But really, it's been that kind of year.
James Brown was not expecting to die when he did. He was 73 years old, with a wheezing chest and swollen feet, but the man wasn't ready to retire. He was going back on the road: New Year's Eve at B. B. King's place in Manhattan, then up to Ontario, west to British Columbia, down to Anaheim in February. Before the tour, in late December, he went to get a new set of bottom teeth screwed into his jaw, but a doctor heard that wheeze and sent him to the hospital. Thirty-six hours later, before dawn broke Christmas morning, his heart petered out.
Yet Mr. Brown was not wholly unprepared to die, either. Several years earlier, in August 2000, he'd drawn up a will in which he bequeathed his "personal and household effects"—his linens and china and such—to six adult children from two ex-wives and two other women. He was very clear, too, that those were the only heirs he intended to favor. "I have intentionally failed to provide for any other relatives or other persons," he wrote in the will. "Such failure is intentional and not occasioned by accident or mistake."
Everything else he owned, including his sixty-acre estate in Beech Island, South Carolina, and his catalog of 800 or so songs, was to remain in a trust, which in turn was divided into two funds: one to educate his grandchildren (seven among those six named children, plus the daughter of his son Teddy, who died in 1973) and a much larger one to pay tuition for "financially needy" students who attend school in South Carolina or Georgia. How much is that trust worth? Hard to say, because Mr. Brown's best assets are of a sort that can be marketed and managed in perpetuity as opposed to simply liquidated for cash. But the lowball estimate is $20 million, which, with proper promotion, could be multiplied many times over for many years to come. Elvis has been dead for three decades, after all, and he's still pulling eight figures annually.
In other words, Mr. Brown left a fortune to poor strangers.
Fifteen months later, none of those poor strangers have seen a nickel. Nor will they for months, and more likely years, to come, by which point there may be little left, after the creditors and the lawyers are paid. The first attorney was hired barely thirty-six hours after Mr. Brown died, and the first legal challenge was initiated less than two weeks after that. The lawsuits and lawyers rapidly multiplied—there are now more than thirty lawyers suing in three different courts—which has had the predictable result of resolving...precisely nothing.
For such a simple little will—all of five pages, and mostly boilerplate at that—there are a stupefying number of issues to resolve.
Mr. Brown's ostensible widow and the mother of James Brown II wants at least a third and perhaps half of his riches—though, as a matter of law, she is almost certainly not his widow nor, as a matter of human physiology, the mother of his biological child. Five of the six children named in the will want the trust dissolved and the will invalidated, which would entitle them to equal shares of the entire estate; that puts them at odds with the sixth sibling, Terry, and his boys, Forlando and Romunzo, who want the will and educational trusts to stand. At least two other daughters whom Mr. Brown never acknowledged also want a share of the pot, as well as eighteen years of back child support. Four more potential children—Jane and John Does I, II, III, and IV in the court records—might have similar claims. The three men Mr. Brown named as trustees have resigned, though two of them, Albert H. "Buddy" Dallas and Alford Bradley, want to be reinstated, because they say a judge bullied them into quitting. That same judge, Doyet Early, wants to put the third former trustee, David Cannon, in jail for not repaying $373,000 in misappropriated funds. Cannon says he can't afford it, which looks bad considering he spent almost $900,000 in cash to build a house in Honduras last year. State investigators are working a criminal case on Cannon, too. The two special administrators Judge Early appointed to replace those three men, meanwhile, are being sued in federal court by Forlando Brown, who argues that they were illegally put in charge and are improperly attempting to shift assets from the trust to the estate, from which their $300-an-hour fees could be paid. The administrators, Adele J. Pope and Robert Buchanan, have in turn sued Bradley, Cannon, Dallas, entertainment lawyer Joel Katz, his firm (Greenberg Traurig), and Enterprise Bank in state court, alleging a years-long conspiracy to swindle millions from Mr. Brown. All of those people have lawyers, and many of them have more than one. Tomi Rae Hynie, the widow who's probably not technically a widow, has five. Her son has his representative, a guardian ad litem, and the guardian ad litem has his own lawyer. Pope and Buchanan have lawyers. Even the anonymous beneficiaries of the trust, all those needy and deserving would-be students, have a lawyer—the attorney general of South Carolina—and they used to have two until Judge Early tossed out the Georgia attorney general.
And those are the relatively dignified legal proceedings.
Outside the courtroom, the family has bickered over absolutely everything, including the disposition of Mr. Brown's body, which for a time was kept in a gold-plated coffin inside a climate-controlled room in his house. When it was finally decided that the corpse would be put in a crypt in daughter Deanna's yard in early March, daughter Yamma nearly missed the private ceremony because police in Atlanta had arrested her the night before for stabbing her husband in the arm with a butcher knife. Since then, Forlando Brown has accused those two aunts, Deanna and Yamma, of swiping mementos, checks, and tens of thousands in cash from his grandfather's house, and in court he called their lawyer—who used to be his lawyer—a liar and a forger, or at least an accomplice to forgery. Yamma, Deanna, and half-brother Daryl accused the former trustees of hunting for "certain assets" when the trustees photographed the woods around Mr. Brown's house, an obvious reference to cash Mr. Brown is believed to have buried in the yard. Tomi Rae Hynie, who prefers to be called Mrs. Brown, was locked out of the house, and she insists someone—the adult children or the former trustees, or a combination thereof—shredded more recent wills, which she believes left half of Mr. Brown's assets to her and her son, and took all of her jewelry and most of Mr. Brown's clothes. "They looted everything," she says. "You're dealing with nothing but liars and thieves and cheats who would throw a widow and a 6-year-old child out on the streets." She also believes, along with several other people, that Mr. Brown was killed, though by whom and how neither she nor anyone else will say. "I can't comment on that right now," she says, "for the safety of myself and my son." Even the lawyer who drew up the will and trust that are now being contested is a tawdry little sideshow: He's in prison for the 2006 murder of a strip-club manager who'd bounced him for nakedly masturbating while waiting for a $300 lap dance.
Wait, there's more.
There are claims against the estate from creditors and would-be creditors. The funeral home wants $17,995 for the programs it produced for the services. One of Mr. Brown's managers wants a $200,000 cut of royalties he was promised. Buddy Dallas would like $624,876 in fees he says he was shorted over seven years. The Pullman Group, to which Mr. Brown mortgaged his royalties in 1999, wants $31 million (the refinancing of that deal is the subject of yet another lawsuit). A doctor wants $8,500 to reimburse her for, among other things, all the times she packed Mr. Brown into a limo to rehab in Atlanta; she'd like an additional $14,000 for two African carvings he never returned to her, or failing that, the carvings. Roosevelt Johnson, too, would like to get paid. "We were always told by Mr. Brown we would be taken care of should anything happen to him," he wrote in his claim. "We, meaning myself, and his group should have at least got two weeks severance pay. Myself for over 30 years of faithful service should get 2.5 million for a lifetime of service as he promised."
Maybe Mr. Brown did make that promise. But he never put it in writing, and it probably wouldn't have mattered if he had. Somebody surely would've sued.
Buddy Dallas met James Brown in 1984 at a political reception in Augusta, Georgia. It was a brief and unremarkable encounter—Dallas mostly remembers that his 2-year-old daughter liked the little man with the funny hair—but the next day, the phone rang in Dallas's office. It was Mr. Brown.
"Mr. Dallas," he said, "I need you to represent me."
"But Mr. Brown," Dallas replied—it was somehow automatic that James Brown was Mr. Brown—"I don't know anything about the entertainment business."
"That's all right," he said. "I'll teach you about the entertainment business. But I need you to represent me now."
Mr. Brown's immediate problems didn't involve entertainment. Mainly, he was broke. He hadn't broken the Billboard 100 in seven years, and he was playing shows for $7,500 that cost him $9,500 to produce. The IRS wanted $20 million in back tas and penalties, the phone company had cut his line, and the founder of the Sacramento chapter of his fan club was after him for child support. "Mr. Dallas," he said a week after they'd met, "I hate to ask you this, but I really, really need some money."
So the first thing Dallas did as Mr. Brown's lawyer was give him $12,000, two grand in cash, the rest in checks paid to his creditors. Less than a year later, Dallas put up his own Lincoln as collateral for another $18,000.
The second thing he did was straighten out the child-support mess in Sacramento. "Mr. Brown," Dallas told him when the paperwork was settled, "you're going to have to be more careful."
"Well, Mr. Dallas," he said, "we're not going to have to worry about that no more."
What he meant was there wouldn't be any future paternity suits: Mr. Brown told at least six people he'd had a vasectomy earlier that year. But that was too little and much too late: One reason his estate is such a disaster is that he left so many heirs who could lay claim to his wealth.
His first wife, Velma, bore three sons in the 1950s, of whom two survive, and a backup singer had a fourth boy. Another singer gave birth to a daughter in 1965, and his second wife, Deidre, had two girls, one in 1968 and the other in 1972. The fan-club woman in Sacramento had her son in 1968.
That's seven children from five women.
And those five women are like grains of sand on a very wide beach. Mr. Brown had an insatiable appetite for women that was at least as pathological as it was sexual. "You'd have to grow up in a whorehouse to understand how James Brown felt about women," one of his confidants says, which is apt because Mr. Brown did, in fact, grow up in a whorehouse. His mother walked out on his father when he was 4, and two years later, he was sent to live in his aunt Honey's brothel in Augusta. He shined shoes for the soldiers from Fort Gordon, danced for nickels and pennies they'd flip at his feet, watched them shamble into Aunt Honey's to fuck the women, watched them shuffle back out.
When Mr. Brown grew up, when he was a famous performer touring the world forty, fifty weeks a year, he fucked a lot of women. That is a deliberate term, fucked, because Mr. Brown was not a man who made love or even had sex. Mr. Brown fucked. "He did not know about the soft," a longtime friend says. A lot of times, he'd let one of his cronies deal with the preliminaries, make small talk with a girl, get her a drink, keep her company. "She ready?" he'd ask. "I ain't got no time now. Make sure she ready." He'd hop on, roll off. Straight missionary, straight to the point. He never saw a reason for much else. "Why's a white man eat a woman?" he once asked a white friend. "What's he get outta that?" Hell, the man was in his sixties before he discovered doggy style on the Playboy Channel. He called up Roosevelt Johnson at three in the morning to tell him about it. "You sittin' down, Mr. Johnson?" he asked, which is what he always said when he had an astonishing new fact to report. "Black man don't know nothing. Black man don't know a damned thing. A white man, he get up in his woman from behind." Johnson pretended to be surprised by that. ("You had to go there with him," he says, "because you didn't know anything Mr. Brown didn't know.")
So how many women? How high can you count? Mr. Brown always kept a few girlfriends on the side, some for decades, and he always found a woman or two in whatever city he happened to be playing. "There'd be times, literally, when one would be coming in the front door while another one was going out the back," says Buddy Dallas.
Naturally, some of them got pregnant.
In 1961, there was a groupie named Ruby Mae Shannon, from Houston, who gave birth that December to a daughter, LaRhonda.
In 1968, there was a pretty white 17-year-old hippie named Lea Mernickle. She was standing in line to buy a photograph after a show in Vancouver when Mr. Brown sent one of his men to go fetch her. "Do you want to meet Mr. Brown?" he asked. Which was a silly question, because really, who _didn't _want to meet Mr. Brown? She followed the man backstage, and Mr. Brown greeted her warmly. "He seemed to be smitten with me," she says. He invited her to fly to Los Angeles with him that night. She said no—her mother would've killed her, disappearing like that—but when he asked her a few days later to fly to Denver, she went. "I was always thinking the best of people," she says. "And my head was in the stars. I was going to hang out with James Brown. How groovy is that?" And it was, except for, as she puts it, "the part I wasn't particularly thrilled about." She flew home pregnant and in October had a baby girl with skin the color of cinnamon, which is what she named her, Cinnamon Nicole Mernickle.
In 1970, there was a woman named Christine Mitchell, whom he culled from the audience at a show in Miami. She gave birth to yet another daughter, Jeanette.
That's ten children so far. Four more—at least four more—are awaiting DNA results. The laws of probability suggest there are others ("Let's hope this thing doesn't spread to Europe," Dallas says), but how many, nobody knows. "My dad would send his hounds to pay women to get rid of the babies or pay them not to talk about it," says La-Rhonda, Ruby Shannon's daughter. "My mom wouldn't settle for it. I used to ask her why, and she would say, 'Because he's a friend.' "
One of Mr. Brown's hounds intercepted Lea Mernickle backstage in the summer of 1968, when he was in Vancouver for another show and she was obviously pregnant and trying to find him to tell him. The man—maybe a lawyer, maybe a bodyguard—asked a lot of questions, "accusatory questions," about her baby. Was she sure Mr. Brown was the father?
"The only thing I want to know," she told the man, "is does he want to know his daughter, does he want to see her, does he want a relationship with her?"
She got paid a couple of thousand dollars, and because Lea was a minor when she got pregnant, her mother signed an affidavit saying Lea had never had sex with Mr. Brown or anyone in his entourage. And that was it.
Not long after Cinnamon was born, Lea married a man of Danish descent and moved to the Okanagan Valley, east of Vancouver, where she had three sons, all blue-eyed and blond. And when she was young, Cinnamon—who was called Nikki as a child and now Nicole as an adult—believed she was Danish, too. "If you'd asked me," she says, "my ancestors were Vikings."
But the white kids in the valley—which would have been all the kids in the valley—were merciless. They made fun of her hair, the kinks she combed out with Vaseline. They said her brothers couldn't be her real brothers, and when she asked her mother if that was true, Lea admitted it was. "Your real father was a famous singer," she said. Maybe she said James Brown, but Nicole had never heard of him. Later, though, when an uncle gave her a copy of Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, she would stare at his face on the cover. She knew that man was her daddy.
Not that it made her feel any better. "I was different, and being different sucked," Nicole says. The white kids said she was black, and when one black family finally moved to town, those kids said she wasn't black enough. In the fifth grade, one of those black girls yanked Nicole off her bike and slapped her. "Stop lying," she said. "James Brown ain't your daddy."
The problem, she decided, was that James Brown simply couldn't find her. That had to be it. Why else would a man abandon his little girl? "I was believing he didn't know I was alive," she says. "He just needed a message, and then he would come and rescue me." He never did, though, even after Lea's marriage broke up and she moved her children to Vancouver and had to collect welfare to get by.
So what's that worth, now that he's dead, all those years of being different and feeling abandoned? Is there a debt owed? One that is even possible to repay?
Nicole never asked for anything while Mr. Brown was alive. But in the mid-'90s, after she'd been divorced and had two children of her own, she did try to meet him. She started making phone calls, which eventually led her to Buddy Dallas. She told him she didn't want money, only to meet her father. It took a while, but Dallas arranged a conference call between himself, Mr. Brown, and Nicole.
Mr. Brown was polite when he answered. Always with the manners. Nicole got to the point: "Do you have any doubt that I'm your flesh and blood?"
"Yeah, I have doubts," Mr. Brown said. "You ain't my child. Somebody lyin' to you, 'cause I ain't your daddy. If you is my daughter, I'd want to hug you and tell you I love you and meet your kids. But you ain't my child."
The conversation lasted all of three minutes. She never spoke to him again, and she saw him only once, from the eighth row of a Vancouver auditorium in 2004. The way she tells it now, there was a moment, in the middle of "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," where he seemed like he saw her in the audience, like he was staring at her from the stage. "He just had this mean look," she says. "Like, I hate you."
Probably just her imagination. James Brown wouldn't have recognized his daughter. And maybe that's why Nicole saw a man who looked so mean. He never gave her a reason to see anything else.
And what about LaRhonda? Does she have anything coming?
She was 4 years old, playing mud cakes in the yard, when her mother called her inside and put her in front of the TV. "I want you to see something," she said. There was a black man singing on the screen. "That's your daddy."
"That ain't my daddy," LaRhonda said. Then she went back to her mud cakes.
For years after that, whenever Mr. Brown played Houston, Ruby Shannon would dress up her daughter and take her to the arena, LaRhonda grousing the whole time about having to see some old man's show. She never believed that man was her daddy. For a long time, she wasn't even sure Ruby was her mother, what with the woman working two jobs to pay the bills, leaving LaRhonda to be raised by her great-aunt.
Then, when LaRhonda was 11, her mother dragged her to yet another show, and she stood outside afterward, by the stage door, waiting for an autograph. It was late, two in the morning, maybe three, before he finally came out, because Mr. Brown had to wipe off the sweat and put on fresh clothes and roll his hair all over again before he'd walk outside. The man liked to stay in character, and the character always looked good.
He recognized LaRhonda in the crowd from seeing her at all those other shows with Ruby. He went straight to her, asked where her mother was. LaRhonda pointed off to one side. She watched Mr. Brown go to Ruby, watched him pick her up and twirl her around. And for the first time she thought, Maybe he is my daddy.
Ruby died in 1975 at 40, a heart attack after surgery. LaRhonda tried for months to tell Mr. Brown. She finally tracked him to a hotel in Birmingham and got through the switchboard by saying her name was Ruby Mae Shannon.
Mr. Brown got on the line. He was sweet. "Hey, baby," he said. "What's goin' on?"
LaRhonda started sobbing. She told him who she was, told him Ruby was dead.
"What you calling me for? I ain't your daddy."
He said that, Mr. Brown did, to his 13-year-old daughter.
"That daddy I always thought was gonna come home," LaRhonda says now, "that was gonna come running and pick me up and hug me and kiss me, that daddy I thought was gonna be like, 'Okay, her mom's passed, I'll take her in'—that daddy never came."
But LaRhonda kept coming back. "Like a canker sore," she says. She'd go to his shows in Houston, find someone to let her backstage. The first time, she was 16, and Mr. Brown just stared at her. He warmed to her as the years went by, or at least thawed some. "Me and your mama was friends," he told her once. "Your mama was built like a Coke bottle," he told her more than once. When she was 19, she took her own daughter, Ciara, backstage, and Mr. Brown held the baby on his lap and called her his granddaughter.
"If she's your granddaughter," one of his backup singers said, "then who's her mama?"
Mr. Brown scowled. "Ain't nobody asked you nothin'." He turned to the Reverend Al Sharpton, who was close to Mr. Brown in those days. "Reverend, you're a man of the cloth. Tell the truth: She look like me?"
"I am a man of the cloth," Sharpton said. "And she looks like you spit her out of your mouth."
Sharpton doesn't recall the conversation, but he says it sounds plausible (especially since LaRhonda does bear a gobsmackingly obvious resemblance to her father). More important, he remembers her clearly. "You mean Peaches?" he says when asked about the daughter in Houston. That's what everyone calls her, Peaches. Her father gave her that name. "She's a Georgia peach," he told Ruby years ago.
And maybe that's the worst thing: La-Rhonda was never a stranger to the people around Mr. Brown. She knew most of her half siblings, held some of their children in her arms, and she found out Mr. Brown had died when his son Daryl called. "Pop's dead," he told her. Even Tomi Rae Hynie, the (maybe) widow, knows Peaches. "And Peaches," she says, "is his daughter."
So again, what's that worth, now that he's dead and LaRhonda has a letter from a DNA lab that says there is a 99.99 percent probability that James Brown is her father? Is there a debt owed?
Perhaps. If the trust stands, both LaRhonda's and Nicole's children would appear to be legitimate beneficiaries of the grandchildren's educational fund. If the will and trust are invalidated, they might be in line for a fraction of what's left after the creditors and lawyers are paid. Their own lawyers have filed for back child support—though ironically, if the will is valid, that likely would be futile, since almost all of Mr. Brown's assets would be in the trust, not the estate. Blood from a stone and all that.
Mostly, though, there is the name: James Brown. Because that name represents both validation for his children and a rebuke toward their father. To have that name says that lawyers and lab techs did in his death what James Brown would not do in his life: acknowledge his children. "And I want people to know," Nicole says, "that he did not acknowledge me."
All things considered, that is not an unreasonable request.
Roosevelt Johnson's request, on the other hand, is not at all reasonable. He would like $2.5 million, which is a number he appears to have pulled out of his hat.
It's an unfortunate number, too, because it makes Johnson look greedy when he is merely desperate. The man's broke. A few months ago, he would've been content with a lousy $1,200, enough to get his landlord off his back and keep his small apartment in a shabby tower on the Lake Erie shore. He's sold his cars and his jewelry, and he's been trying to find work, any work. "But people look at your résumé and what you've been doing for the past forty years, and they think, This guy doesn't really want a job," he says. "Yeah, I do. My job died."
He never saw it coming, either. When Johnson stood in the big cemetery on Laney Walker Boulevard in the winter of 2004, part of him really believed he'd be the one leaving Mr. Brown behind. Yes, he was twenty years younger than his boss, and he knew Mr. Brown aged like any other man, but Mr. Brown, the flesh-and-blood mortal, was not the same as James Brown, the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business, the character and icon. James Brown was—is—immortal. Any man could confuse the two, the person and the persona, and not even know his mind was playing tricks on him.
Mr. Brown came from nothing, a poor black son of the Depression South. His father made a pauper's living slicing trees for sap he could haul on his back to the turpentine plant in Bamberg, and little James's clothes were so raggedy, the teachers sometimes sent him home from school. He started stealing so he could buy something decent to wear, and when he got caught breaking into cars at 15, a judge gave him eight to sixteen years in prison. But he had a gift. The other inmates called him Music Box on account of his voice, his ear for harmonies and chords, the way he could arrange a gospel quartet into a sound so sweet men would weep. He told the parole board he'd sing for the Lord if they'd let him loose, which they did in 1952, three years and a day into his sentence.
That's how it started, a 19-year-old ex-con singing gospel in a little town called Toccoa in the hills northeast of Atlanta. He charted his first hit, "Please Please Please," in March 1956, another hundred by April 1974, and twenty-eight more before his last, "Living in America," reached number four on the pop charts in 1986. He sold tens of millions of records and earned hundreds of millions of dollars, and yet his commercial success was less remarkable than his cultural influence. James Brown changed modern music. He put the beat on the One, birthed funk from gospel and soul, laid the foundation (and countless sample tracks) for hip-hop and rap. Long after the hits stopped coming, even after he got busted for smoking angel dust and punching women, people still paid to see him because he was still James Brown. In 2005, when his statue was set on the promenade in the middle of Broad Street in Augusta, near the intersection of James Brown Boulevard and not far from what would become James Brown Arena, Sharpton whispered to him, "You know, Mr. Brown, you've built a brand so high even you couldn't tear it down." He was still Mr. Dynamite, still Soul Brother Number One, still, and always, the Godfather of Soul. _Only four _B's in music, he liked to say. Beethoven, Bach, Brahms...and Brown.
Roosevelt Johnson was a part of that phenomenon for forty years. And what's he got now? A job with James Brown didn't come with a pension plan. There was no junior ecutive waiting to step up, keep the company running. Mr. Brown was the company. Everyone else was merely support staff, temp workers until the boss died.
So here's what he's got now: One of Mr. Brown's combs. A partial bottle of Mr. Brown's Viagra. A few hundred snapshots of himself with famous people. Some digital recordings of concerts Mr. Brown gave him that might be worth something. And he has a few stories to tell. He peddled one to a tabloid last year about Tomi Rae Hynie supposedly being a lesbian (which she denies). Forty years with a legend and that's what he's reduced to: selling scraps of another man's fame.
And why shouldn't he? A dead man's celebrity is a commodity, a resource for anyone willing to stake a claim to it. And a lot of people are. Take, for instance, Tascha Houston, a charming lady of a certain age whom Mr. Brown hired in 1966 as one of the original J. B. Dancers. She uses that exact phrase many, many times. As in, "Mr. Brown told me, 'I want you to keep your part of the legacy alive as one of the original J. B. Dancers.' " As in, "As long as I live, even if I'm in a wheelchair, I will always try to carry on the legacy of the original J. B. Dancers."
She is not at all insincere. She clearly adored Mr. Brown. He was her best friend and her mentor, she says, and then she has to stop talking because she has begun to cry. She's brought her manager with her, Mr. Marlowe ("Just put Mr. Marlowe," she says. "That's respect"), as well as a few photos from the day she laid a wreath on the James Brown Bridge in Macon, and a folder of official documents from mayors in five cities—Atlanta, Augusta, Philadelphia, Chattanooga, and Lithonia, Georgia—proclaiming various dates to be Tascha Houston Day, primarily in honor of her being an original J. B. Dancer. "I have a person who works on that, to make sure I get the recognition," she explains. "The minute you say James Brown, everyone jumps on it."
The reason she wants that recognition, of course, is that she still performs. She dances for a James Brown impersonator, and she's choreographed what she calls a one-woman tribute to the Godfather of Soul. "I would like to get it on Broadway," she says.
LaRhonda, meanwhile, would like to be on TV. "You just don't know," she says. "I am so destined to do a reality show." She has put a great deal of thought into this. All the Brown children, the acknowledged and the alleged, would be sequestered in a big house on an island, where they would wait, one by one and week by week, for a lab technician to compare their DNA to Mr. Brown's. At the end of each episode, one potential heir would be called to a sterile room, where the results would be revealed. "And when they find out they're not his child," she says, "it'd be like, 'Papa's got a brand new bag!Now get your things and get on outta here.' " She jerks her thumb over her shoulder when she says that last part; every decent reality show needs a gesture to go with the catchphrase.
One sibling she knows would not be kicked off the island is her half sister Nicole. LaRhonda calls her often, and they have exchanged photographs, but she has not traveled to Vancouver, and Nicole has not come to Houston, which genuinely frustrates her. "I can't wait to meet my sister," she says. "On the reality show. Or like, on Oprah. Oh, that'd be one of those moments." And then she's quiet while she dabs the tears out of her eyes.
A few weeks after LaRhonda sketched her reality show, a woman she calls Auntie Fannie arrived at the Park West Theater in Chicago, where the Chicago Music Awards were being dispensed, wearing a full-length white fur coat with tawny streaks and trailed by two men from Shine On TV, in Augusta, and a filmmaker named Harrison Starks. Fannie had been invited to receive an Award of Honor because, as the program noted, she used to perform "alongside her famous brother, 'The Godfather of Soul' James Brown"** **and because she is now "sending a positive message through the music she wrote with James Brown before his death."
The lady at the podium finished announcing the award, and then Fannie Brown bounded onto the stage and began lip-synching to a single she recorded with a few musicians who used to back Mr. Brown. It is called "He's the God Father** **of Soul, How We Love Him So," and it is obviously not one she wrote with Mr. Brown because it's about him being dead. During the chorus, Fannie did the Robot, and she ended the number by repeating, over and over, "my brother" and "I love you so."
Then, in quick succession, she plugged her Web site, two other sites where her CDs can be purchased, and I Got Soul, the film Harrison Starks is making.
Perhaps Fannie does love Mr. Brown. She is clearly distressed by the mess that is his estate. "If he'd left it to me, Michael Jackson, and Prince, we'd never let him down," she says. She lets that hang there while she fans herself, sweaty from the performance. Then: "The love that Michael and I have, oh, from when we was babies..."
Fannie Brown Buford (she appropriated the name) is not, however, Mr. Brown's sister. He did not have a sister. Still, she's been calling herself that since at least 1993, when she was mentioned in a photo caption in Jet. Yet she is referenced in neither of his autobiographies, and none of Mr. Brown's longtime associates remember her as anything more than an occasional background performer, if that. "You mean the souvenir girl?" one of them says. Yes, the souvenir girl. Fannie says so in her song: I'm loud-talking Fannie / Selling James Brown souvenirs / From Japan to Miami. Also, she sold them at his funeral in Augusta: "Cold Sweat" washcloths, "Hot Pan(t)s" pot holders, that sort of thing.
As Fannie tells it, she met Mr. Brown when she was 11, in 1967, when he played the Regal Theater in Chicago. "He was sliding onstage, and I was sliding in the aisle," she says. "He did the splits, and I did the splits and a backbend." She caught his eye, and he let her come to wherever he was playing on the weekends during the school year, as much as she wanted when classes were out. She says Mr. Brown essentially raised her (which would make her the only child he raised). And the sister thing? Not her doing. "He said I was his sister." Or like a sister. Or something.
She believes Mr. Brown's story needs to be told and told properly, which is why she is writing a book and working with Harrison Starks on the film, about which he will reveal very little. "What I'm really worried about is all these phony people like Spike," he says. Starks means Spike Lee, who has for years planned an authorized and well-publicized bio-pic and who, in matters of black cultural icons, is generally not referred to as phony."A lot of people don't know the real history," Starks says. "I do. And the real question is, Who killed James Brown?"
Fannie Brown is nodding her head. Apparently that is indeed the question.
"Ain't no one can tell his legacy but me," she says. "He never did anything without talking to me about it." Why bother asking anyone else? "You won't get anything, because everyone you dealing with is liars and druggies. How will you get to the truth when all those people heroined-up and cracked-up and coked-up?
"History will find the truth," she says. "And when I can find someone to pay for my story, I'm gonna tell the truth."
The truth? No one knows the truth about James Brown, not the whole truth, because Mr. Brown never let anyone close enough to reveal the full measure of himself. He could make you believe you were close, make you believe that you, and only you, had been blessed with a glimpse of his soul. But that's merely charisma. Or manipulation.
"People were his confidant in that area of his life where he was dealing with them," Sharpton says. "All of us—all of us—were consequential to his self-image."
And that's from a man who was closer than most to Mr. Brown. He toured with him in the 1970s, lived with him for a while in the early 1980s, wrote the introduction to his autobiography. He's called Mr. Brown his surrogate father, and Mr. Brown likened him to a son. Yet he has no illusions, either. He knows he was also a useful prop, a gifted black preacher Mr. Brown could mold and brand as a protégé, help smooth the friction with the civil rights establishment (Mr. Brown, after all, endorsed Richard Nixon). "He saw me as his answer to Dr. King," Sharpton says, and then he drops into a pretty good impersonation: "I'm gonna make my own Dr. King."
(Decades later, Mr. Brown still saw his reflection in Sharpton. "One of the proudest moments of my life," he told the reverend in 2004, "was when you walked out at the Democratic National Convention with that James Brown hairdo and brought James Brown into mainstream national politics.")
For all that, Sharpton doesn't claim to have known the total man. "Only tell people what they need to know, Rev," Mr. Brown told him long ago. "And anybody want to know anything outside their lane, don't trust 'em." Mr. Brown trusted Al Sharpton because he stayed in his lane.
Everyone saw in Mr. Brown only what he let them see. A mistress saw a frustrated old man trying to get hard while whacked out on PCP. His pastor in Augusta saw a spiritual man who quoted Scripture, especially Matthew: "Verily, I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Forlando Brown saw a grandfather who read through his college applications and checked his grades every semester. Buddy Dallas saw a captivating performer, an astute businessman, and more than that, a man who survived poverty and prison and drugs and the IRS. We rather die on our feet / Than keep living on our knees / Say it loud / I'm black and I'm proud. That's what Buddy Dallas saw.
But none of them saw it all. Indeed, you can tell how close someone was to Mr. Brown by how readily they admit that fact.
"Mr. Brown was an exceptionally slick, conniving, brilliant man," says Charles Bobbit, his friend for forty years and his manager from 1966 to 1977 and again from 2000 until Mr. Brown died. "And he made sure—made sure—he was misunderstood."
Yet there was one matter on which he clearly wanted to be understood: his legacy.
Mr. Brown told people for twenty years how he wanted to be remembered. A few small details would change now and again, but his general wishes were consistent.
For instance, he didn't want his children getting his money. Why depends on who he was talking to and what his mood was at the time. Partly, he was a detached father. Blame the constant touring, blame the multiple divorces, blame whatever demons crawled around his head. "He was never much of a family man," Bobbit says. "But I guess you got that." Sometimes he'd say that being James Brown's child was enough of an inheritance, that the name alone was worth more than anything he had growing up. He worked for his wealth, and they could, too. If he was in a foul mood, he'd be blunter: "They ain't gettin' rich off my back," he told at least four people over the years. "They ain't gettin' a damned dime."
And that was before two of those children sued him. In the 1970s, when Deanna was 6 and Yamma was 3, he gave them writing credits on two dozen of his records, including "Get Up Offa That Thing," which went to number four on the R&B chart. It was a low-rent scam, a way for Mr. Brown to hide money from the tax man by giving it to his daughters. Twenty-seven years later, Deanna and Yamma wanted their cut of the royalties and demanded $1 million in federal court. (The case was eventually settled for far less.)
When the suit was filed, Mr. Brown went to the Reverend Larry Fryer, his pastor in Augusta, and the preacher held him while Mr. Brown wept. "He boohooed big time," Fryer says. "Mr. Brown hated that. You can write that: He hated it. 'Cause you suing your daddy. You don't sue your daddy."
"My daddy never forgot that," says Terry Brown, the son who wants the will left intact. "He said, 'I'll forgive them, 'cause they're my kids and kids do stupid things. But I won't forget.' And you can believe that."
Or maybe he never forgave. Bobbit says he tried to get him to reconcile with his daughters. "They'll stab you in the back," Mr. Brown said. "Don't trust 'em." Tomi Rae says she tried, too, even gathered them all together for dinner. "I used to beg him," she says. "I used to say, 'Baby, please,' and he'd say, 'Baby, I'll do it for you. But they don't even like you, and they'll stab you in the back.' " When dinner was served, she says, "he got his plate and left the table."
He was still bitter in late 2006. Four days before he died, Emma Austin, the wife of Mr. Brown's childhood friend Leon, took him a pot of her vegetable soup because she knew he was coughing and swollen and weak. She left it at the guardhouse at the top of the drive, and by the time she got home, Mr. Brown was calling to thank her. They talked for a long while, like they always did, and the conversation drifted to Deanna and Yamma. "Sis"—he always called her Sis—"I will never forgive and I will never forget."
"Well now, Bro, we're getting to that age where we have to forgive," she said. "We can't get over to the other side holding grudges and not thinking well of people."
"Sis, I love you," he said. "And I hear you. But I will never forgive."
Rather than give his money to his own children, Mr. Brown wanted to leave it to poor kids. He might have been a lousy father, but he had an almost visceral empathy for kids who didn't have decent clothes or enough to eat. Which isn't difficult to understand, because he never forgot what it was like to be one of those kids.
He never wanted to forget, either.
The slope above the pond on the east side of his property is barren, an ugly scar of red clay about the size of a football field. Buddy Dallas was always telling him he should get it landscaped, put in some bushes or lay some sod, pretty it up. "Nah, Mr. Dallas," he'd say. "Leave it alone." Instead, he'd send one of the grounds crew up there every so often to drag a harrow over it. The rain would wash the loose dirt into his fishing pond and make an awful mess, but Mr. Brown liked the smell. "Reminds me where I came from," he'd say.
"He understood the pain of poverty," Fryer says. "How it feels, how it looks. What other people say about you. How hard it is to get out and make something of your life." Fryer is a large man who lives in a small house in a worn Augusta neighborhood not far from the Red Lobster on Walton Way, where he introduced himself to Mr. Brown in 1991, shortly after Mr. Brown got out of prison for running from the police high on PCP. The reverend invited Mr. Brown to church and was his pastor until he died. Fryer was with him when Mr. Brown handed out turkeys and toys, thousands of them, to poor folks at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and he prayed with him at the turkey giveaway in 2006 when Mr. Brown looked so sick the reverend feared the Lord was ready to take him.
"I don't mean to do Scripture with you," Fryer says. "But I'm a pastor. You knew I would. And Scripture says, what profits a man if he gains the world but loses his soul? That's how it was with me and Mr. Brown. The evidence of his life is that he did not lose his soul."
And that evidence goes back years. The idea of a trust—specifically, the I Feel Good Trust, which is what the fund meant to send poor kids to college is called—dates at least from 1988, when Mr. Brown performed a charity concert in Augusta to benefit a local children's hospital. The woman who produced the show, a songwriter and singer named Jacque Hollander, made a video about one of the sick kids at the hospital, a little girl with cancer. Near the end of that tape, after Hollander had made a wrenching case for a worthy cause, she announced the creation of "the I Feel Good Children's Trust Fund." Hollander was not acting on a whim. "This was discussed with Mr. Brown and with Buddy Dallas," she says now. "I mean, it was there."
Well, almost there. Papers to establish the trust were never filed. Yet around the time the tape was made, she sat in an office with Dallas and listened as
Mr. Brown outlined his plan for it. "I want everything to go into that trust," he said. "My house, my royalties, everything."
"Mr. Brown," Dallas said. "You've got kids...."
"Dammit, I ain't giving them a stepping-stone to make history," he snapped. "They all got education. I been supporting them. I ain't givin' them a dime."
Dallas remembers that conversation almost verbatim, which is notable because Hollander didn't speak to him for twenty years after it took place. And Hollander certainly has no motive to soften Mr. Brown's image now. In fact, she says he raped her later that same year, drove her deep into earlier woods, high on PCP, and told her to take her clothes off. When she refused, he said, "I'm not going to ask you again. And if you don't, I'm gonna." Then he put a shotgun in her face. "He told me, 'If you try to run away, I'll kill you,' " she says. "He told me he owned me. He told me he was giving me a blessing." (She never brought criminal charges, but she later passed two polygraphs, including one administered by a twenty-seven-year veteran of the FBI.)
Also, she's glad he's dead. "His death was the most unbelievable Christmas present God could have given me," she says. "Is that a horrible thing to say?" Not really, considering. But she does like to believe that Mr. Brown called his fund the I Feel Good Trust because he remembered the first one, that he chose that name to cleanse his sins.
In the summer of 2003, Mr. Brown positioned a lawn chair on his front porch, sat down, and told his grandson Forlando to get the broom from the pool house, the blue one with the tattered yellow bristles.
Then he told him to sweep the lawn. Which Forlando did. Mr. Brown had a way of making people do stupid, humiliating things, like not speak when he was in the room or be cowed into letting him pick their meals in restaurants. Once, when Forlando answered a question with "yeah" instead of "yes, sir," Mr. Brown glowered and pointed toward another room in the house. "Get up," he said. "Go there." Forlando was 17 years old, but he sat in that room, alone and quiet, for three hours. "He demanded respect, and if he didn't get it, you weren't a part of his life," Forlando says.
So he swept the lawn. Hours passed before Mr. Brown told him to stop. "Now, boy," he said, "that's why you gotta get an education. Because if you don't, people gonna make you do senseless stuff like that. You ain't nothin' without an education."
Mr. Brown felt that he'd been blessed, that God had given him a voice and rhythm and the charisma to use them. But he never got past the sixth grade. So what if he hadn't been blessed? He probably would have done his full sixteen years for breaking into cars and not much else after that.
Which is why the I Feel Good Trust was set up as an educational fund. The cause wasn't new to him—"Don't Be a Dropout" broke the top fifty way back in November 1966—but he began to formalize it as his legacy on February 24, 1999. He met that night at his office to sign a will and trust drawn up by H. Dewain Herring, who, before he shot up a strip club and was sent to prison, was a respected South Carolina estate lawyer. Mr. Brown brought a tape deck with him, which he used to record four and a half minutes of musings about his eventual demise. He rambled a bit, but he made three important points:
Hopefully the legacy will serve as a mentor for young people to make it in all walks of life. This is...let me say this: My intention is not just to go to black kids; this is to go to poor children. And they're not going to limit no color. We've had that, enough of that in America already, and now we're going to begin to move over.
And then:
All the things that I have... I'm James Brown twenty-four hours a day, and that's been proven, even in litigations that I suffered, even in my home, 'cause I was James Brown. So let's not not be James Brown now, now that I'm being paid. I want everything to go down this way.
And finally:
When you get my age, you don't think about nothing but what you can do for people. It's like, it's not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. And I think this is true, which is to the country and mankind throughout the world. That I made it, from God's blessings, in spite of all obstacles, all the ups and downs we had as people, yeah, He's taken me to a point that I can give back, like I prayed before I come here. Nothing is mine anyway; it's all given to me by God. So whatever I do with it, I hope I'm doing His will. Thank you.
For whatever reason, he didn't sign those documents until June 15, 1999. A little more than a year later, in August 2000, he signed a revised version. The only significant change was that he made the trust irrevocable.
The people who are fighting over Mr. Brown's riches all agree, oddly enough, that he would want much of his wealth to benefit the poor.
What they disagree on is who is best suited to control Mr. Brown's assets and, more to the point, how much should be given away and who should get the rest. It's all become very nasty and would appear quite complicated, considering the forests of pulp trees slaughtered for legal briefs in the first year alone. But it is really, boiled down, a family feud fought on three fronts.
One front is Forlando Brown, who wants his grandfather's will and trust left exactly as written. He would then like a group of investors he has assembled to buy out the assets in the trust for a fair-market, court-approved price, which he suspects would be anywhere from $60 million to $100 million. It is not a wholly altruistic offer—the investors, though not Forlando, intend to make a profit—but it would be efficient. Professional marketers could wring more out of Mr. Brown's image and songs than some court-appointed administrator, and they would return a percentage of their annual gross to the trust. The I Feel Good Trust, then, would be flush with cash and would require only the services of a competent money manger.
Another front is Tomi Rae Hynie. She is suing as the "omitted spouse," which is a legal term meaning Mr. Brown never got around to changing his will to include the woman he married after it was written. Of course, she claims he did revise his will to leave her half of everything, but she can't prove it because she also claims those documents were shredded before she could get into the house to retrieve them. Yet on at least one occasion, in 2006, Mr. Brown had a codicil drawn up by an attorney named Jay B. Ross that would have left her 17 percent. That document also bequeathed 5 percent each to her son, to Roosevelt Johnson, to Mr. Brown's son Daryl, and to his housekeeper and property manager, David Washington. A percentage of what—all of his assets? his royalties?—wasn't clear, except in the case of Charles Bobbit, who was to receive 10 percent of the damages expected from a pending lawsuit against the photo agency Corbis.
Johnson and Bobbit watched Mr. Brown initial every page and then sign the last. He gave the papers to Bobbit, who put them in his briefcase. A few hours later, Mr. Brown asked for them back. No one ever saw those papers again. Bobbit figures he probably got mad at Tomi Rae and tore them up, which sounds reasonable. Mr. Brown got mad at Tomi Rae a lot. He used to call David Washington from the road, all worked up, saying, "Mr. Washington, pack her clothes. Get her outta there." Then Washington would wait a few hours for him to call again. "Nah," Mr. Brown would say. "I think she gonna be all right. Put her clothes back."
The real problem Tomi Rae Hynie has, though, is proving she was ever legally Mrs. Brown. She met him in 1997 in Las Vegas, where she was working as a Janis Joplin impersonator, and on June 11, 2001—seventeen years after his vasectomy—she had a son, whom she named James Brown II. Six months later, Mr. Brown married her. Bobbit asked him if he was sure, if he knew what he was doing.
"When you go home, Mr. Bobbit, there's someone waiting for you," he said. "When I go home, I'm all alone. So yes, I know what I'm doing. I love her, and I'm gonna marry her."
Unfortunately, Tomi Rae had married a Pakistani man in 1997. She says she was a dupe in a green-card scam, that the marriage was never consummated, and that she tried to get it annulled almost immediately when she discovered her groom had three other wives in Pakistan. But she didn't. Which meant her 2001 marriage to Mr. Brown was invalid, and he never remarried her after she finally did get the annulment in 2004.
The third front is the five children to whom Mr. Brown left only trinkets. They want the will invalidated and the trust dissolved, arguing in court papers that Mr. Brown was tricked into signing them by Cannon, Dallas, and Bradley. Coupled with the suit filed against those men by the special administrators, Adele Pope and Robert Buchanan—which notes prominently that Mr. Brown "had a limited formal education and relied heavily upon his trusted legal and financial advisors"—it seems to dredge up all those old, ugly images of shady white guys (though Bradley is black) stealing from a dumb black song-and-dance man.
To be fair, Mr. Brown did, on occasion, lapse into utter lunacy. He was terribly paranoid, convinced the government had bugged the armoire in the den, placed tiny cameras in the curtains, pointed satellites through his window, even wired up the yard. "See them trees," he'd say when the wind blew and the branches swayed. "That's them. They watching me." And he would occasionally flat out lose his mind. "Motherfucker was crazy," says Gloria Daniel, a girlfriend he kept on the side for forty years. "It was the drugs."
Mr. Brown smoked his drugs—PCP, until that got hard to find, then cocaine—mid with tobacco from his Kools. "You sitting there rolling tobacco out of a cigarette—that's a woman's job—and you sitting there naked so he can look at you 'cause he getting ready to fuck you," she says. "Yeah, right." She rolls her eyes. The drugs, to say nothing of the diabetes and the prostate cancer, made him impotent. "He tried like hell, though," she says. "He'd wear you out. That man died trying to come."
One night in the summer of 2001, after he'd slathered her in Vaseline ("He liked you all greased up," she says. "Like a porkchop") and wore her out trying to come, he gave up and left the room, and Gloria dozed off. When she woke up, Mr. Brown was standing at the foot of the bed in a full-length mink coat over his bare chest, a black cowboy hat, and silk pajama pants with one leg tucked into a cowboy boot and the other hanging out. He had a shotgun over his shoulder and a white stripe of Noxzema under each eye. "I'm an Indian tonight, baby," he announced. "C'mon, let's let 'em have it." Then he dumped a pickle jar of change on the floor, told her to get a machete, and went out to the garage. He took the Rolls, drove ten miles to Augusta, weaving all over the road, clipping mailbos, smoking more dope, and screaming about being an Indian. Gloria kept thinking she should flag down a cop, say she'd been kidnapped.
Like she says, motherfucker was crazy on drugs.
When he wasn't high, though, Mr. Brown was firmly in control of his affairs. That's another point upon which all the warring parties—his kids, Tomi Rae Hynie, Forlando—concur. He was suspicious of everyone and kept an eye on all of his business dealings and the people handling them on his behalf. Bobbit used to wonder if he had ESP, the way Mr. Brown could read people. "I can't see how Mr. Brown would know everything going on around him and not know who was ripping him off," he says.
And if Buddy Dallas and the rest tricked Mr. Brown into signing a bad will and trust, why? "Pretty slick," Forlando says drily, "conning my grandfather into giving his money to poor kids." The alleged motive is that the trust, as well as Mr. Brown's earlier dealings, was structured in such a way as to guarantee enormous commissions to the trustees. But if they were going to steal his money with a bogus will, why not just name themselves beneficiaries and avoid all that paperwork? As for Dallas, whose financial records have been examined, "If there was such a grand conspiracy, why am I worrying about my credit card bills every month?"
But there's one more thing, and it's important. Buddy Dallas loved James Brown, Mr. Brown loved Buddy Dallas, and there is a long line of people who will testify to that. "Mr. Dallas is a good man," Mr. Brown told Bobbit. "Mr. Dallas didn't even know me, and he gave me $30,000."
"He always said he'd never forget what Mr. Dallas did for him," David Washington says.
The courts will maybe, probably, eventually sort all this out. And Dallas will be sitting there, like he was in February and Forlando Brown was on the witness stand. "None of us in this room," Forlando said, "not one of us sang and danced for James Brown. He did that. And I don't think it's right for any of us..." His voice broke. "For any of us to tell my grandfather what to do with his money."
Dallas was in a chair against one wall, just inside the bar rail, and he had his head down, weeping for his dead friend and the mess his legacy has become.
The tour after Christmas was going to be the last one. Mr. Brown would play his final show in Anaheim, then pack it in after fifty-seven years. "When we finish this little thing, we going on a vacation," he'd told Bobbit. He was going to take Tomi Rae and go to San Francisco, a few other towns, spend some money. "Then we going to Vegas, and I'm gonna marry her again. She's my wife, I love her, and I ain't gonna punish her no more."
But first they had to do the shows, and for that Mr. Brown needed new teeth. Getting implants screwed into the jaw is a brutal procedure, and Mr. Brown didn't think he could stand the pain. He wanted to be put under. But the man was sick. His knees were shot and his feet were swollen, his stomach hurt all the time, he was constipated and couldn't pee too well, either. Now he had a bad cough, and he was losing weight.
Bobbit was waiting for him when Washington drove Mr. Brown to the dentist in Atlanta. Bobbit had a physician with him who gave Mr. Brown the once-over and then told him he might not ever wake up from anesthesia. He checked him into the hospital that Saturday, December 23. He rested all night and the next day, the doctors checking him, trying to clear out the pneumonia. Bobbit and Washington stayed with him. And then, late Sunday, just before midnight, Mr. Brown told Washington to leave the room.
"I'm gonna leave here tonight," he said.
"If you're talking about what I think you're talking about," Bobbit said, "that's a trip I can't make with you." He was trying to lighten the mood, not ready for Mr. Brown to die, not believing he _could _die.
Mr. Brown stayed serious. "I want you to look out for my wife, if you can," he said. "And I want you to look out for Little Man, if you can. And look out for Reverend Sharpton."
He always called Tomi Rae's son Little Man. He knew he wasn't his son, but whenever someone told him to get a DNA test, he said no, not while he was alive. Because he loved Little Man, loved him as his own, almost as if he was finally going to be a proper father, make up for all those years and all those other children. Bobbit thought that's why he called him Little Man. "It was his ego," he says. "Like, 'Look at him, look at that little man—he's just like me.' "
Bobbit settled into a chair at the foot of the bed. Mr. Brown lay back and dozed. Then he bolted upright, grabbed at his chest. "I'm on fire, I'm on fire," he said. "I'm burning up. Burning up." He flopped across the bed, and his gown rose up, exposing him. Bobbit got a blanket to cover him up. He was leaning down, his face close to Mr. Brown, still holding the blanket. He heard Mr. Brown take three short, weak breaths, saw his eyes open wide for an instant, then close. "As God is my witness, I don't know why," he says, "but I looked at my watch and it was one twenty-four."
The doctors worked on his body for another twenty-one minutes, but James Brown was already dead.
Some nights, when David Washington is asleep, Mr. Brown comes to him. He doesn't like to talk about this, because people tend to think you're crazy when you talk about a dead man visiting you in your sleep. But it's true. It's just the two of them, like it was all those years, Mr. Brown in his bed, Mr. Washington in the chair, watching an old Western on the television.
"Mr. Washington," he says, "go fix me some corn and bacon." And Mr. Washington gets up and goes to the kitchen and makes the food, puts salt and pepper and butter on the corn, the way Mr. Brown likes it.
He started working for Mr. Brown in 1994, part-time on the grounds crew after pulling twelve-hour shifts at the textile mill. Mr. Brown found him in the yard one afternoon, asked if he was smoking dope, asked if he was drinking on the job. "No, sir, Mr. Brown."
"Then why your eyes all red?"
"I just came from my other job, sir."
Mr. Brown told him to quit the mill, come work for him full-time. A man shouldn't have to work two jobs, wear himself out like that.
For the next ten years, Mr. Washington did almost everything for Mr. Brown. He cooked his meals and laundered his clothes and drew his bath. It wasn't always easy, because Mr. Washington never knew what kind of mood he'd be in. "You got used to it," he says. "Don't talk. Just, 'Yes, sir,' 'No, sir.' " He was supposed to be there from nine to five, but he'd stay late, listen to Mr. Brown talk, buy him a carton of cigarettes in the middle of the night, watch Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune with him. Mr. Brown didn't have many friends who'd watch TV with him. Mostly, he had people from whom he demanded respect, which isn't the same as a friend at all.
"He told me a long time ago, all the friends he got he could count on one hand," Mr. Washington says. That's hard on a man, makes him lonely. Sometimes Mr. Washington almost pitied him, though he'd never use that word, because Mr. Brown wouldn't take pity. "He was, like, missing something," Mr. Washington says. "He had everything in the world, but it was like...just something missing. Some kind of happiness."
Mr. Washington was his friend. And Mr. Brown took care of him, bought him a bedroom set and a burgundy Lincoln, paid for the burial when Mr. Washington's brother died. He told Mr. Washington he was going to buy him a house and maybe a couple of acres on Johnson Lake. Mr. Washington isn't sure where Johnson Lake is, exactly, and it doesn't matter now, anyway.
He still works at the house. Keeps the place cleaned up, looks after the grounds. Mr. Brown always said he wanted 430 Douglas Drive to be another Graceland, a shrine to the Godfather of Soul. But he's been dead sixteen months now, and Mr. Washington is one of very few people allowed past the gate without a judge's permission.
Mr. Brown came to him there once, too. About a week after he died, Mr. Washington saw him as he came up the driveway. He was sitting on the front porch, his hands folded in his lap, and Mr. Washington thought, Mr. Brown, get yourself back in the house. You got the pneumonia.
The driveway sloped down toward the pond, and Mr. Washington lost sight of the house at the bottom of the hill. He climbed the rise on the other side, and Mr. Brown was still there. Then he started to fade, and when Mr. Washington got to the house, it was empty and he was all alone.
The house is still empty now, and Mr. Brown is in a crypt in his daughter's front yard, lying there like somebody's pet.


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Decentralized training improves justice services
Baucau – All 56 justice officials throughout Timor-Leste are participating in a training programme that combines theoretical, practical and on-the-job learning. The initiative, designed to increase effectiveness and efficiency of justice services, brings trainers to the officials' workplace, allowing for the normal running of the Courts and continuous follow-up on topics discussed. (Lee versaun Tetum iha ne'e)
- The first systematized training programme specifically designed for Court staff is being held with all 56 clerks and administrators across Timor-Leste's judicial districts, and combines theoretical, practical and on-the-job learning.
- The training programme, supported by system-wide procedural improvements and the implementation of an electronic case management system, is aimed at increasing effectiveness and efficiency of justice services in the country.
"It is being great to have the trainers come here, so we can keep our activities and, in addition, receive support on the spot when the doubts arise", said Martinha da Costa, justice official in Baucau Court.
This is the first systematized training program specifically designed for court staff. Training topics, such as ethics, statistics, inventory, the officials' statute, penal and criminal processes, which were defined through a comprehensive need assessment, are supported by system-wide procedural improvements designed to ensure consistent implementation across all judicial districts. Importantly, the training will support implementation of the electronic case management system.
In Baucau, the 12 justice officials are excited about the training, and are positive on the impacts it will bring once the electronic case management system is piloted, next March.
"The changes will facilitate our work, accelerate the processing of Court orders and allow quicker resolution of cases", said Emelita Seixas, civil section.
"With the case management system, organizing and monitoring our work will be much easier, thus improving the services we offer", added the secretary of Baucau Court, Sebastião Soares.
The training, which began in September 2013 and will conclude in June 2014, is being supported by UNDP's Justice System Programme (JSP). New recruits and experienced staff are being taught differently, appropriate to their skills, but all will be given extensive training on the case management system. Some classes mix experienced officials such as Martinha, that started working in the justice system when the country institutions were being established back in 2000, with newly arrived staff like Emelita, who became a Court clerk in August 2012, encouraging participants to exchange and incentivizing peer support. The training is reinforced by the distribution of reference manuals for staff.
Through this initiative, JSP is helping to bring a transformational change in the functioning of the justice system beyond the central level. By extending the existing training possibilities beyond Dili, a significant impact can be made in increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of justice services at the local levels. In addition, by building local level capacities, the initiative also supports the new decentralization framework.
The training program is made possible by a US$500,000 grant from UNDP's Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific.

subset: commoncrawl


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Opinion: Hyperinflation and Witch Hunts in Venezuela
Does the collapsing "bolivar fuerte" really make opposition politicians more sinful? Photo: Associated Press
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
... I ... what ... the economy suffers hyperinflation or until smut is wearing Anastasia O'Grady are America's calm is consumer ... so the of ... the poll this week about Venezuela ... and it's ... on its services about the political assaults have outrageous charges against the opposition figures question that the government but but ... really it's about what happens to a society when you destroy the currency were really were saying that play out right now ... right I think that that actually that ... no one understands this better than the president and swell ... Nicolas mentor who ... took the place of a vote on this ... same party ... same ideology ... and I he was elected in April very narrow it was contested election ... and ah now there's ... a lot of economic promise particularly coming from the devaluation of the currency ... I and the ensuing inflation ... and out as a result of the government is launching really fantastic charges against ... the main leader of the opposition ... trying I think to both of ... you know ... on tarnish his name ... but also to create a kind of a circus a distraction from the hardships that people are feeling because of the economic decline this rate so there it using them Mr. Capri lists of being part of the crazy orgies and ... prostitution all kinds ... of wild stuff and I a I gather up from your reporting year you don't put a whole lot of stock in these the ... charges by the government ... well course anything's possible but what is interesting is that it's part of a pattern ... of the allegations against the opposition and in fact in Congress ... I in the first half of this year the Venice Whelan on news ... media is reporting ... that I'm one third of the time in Congress has been ... used by the ruling party ... to launch on ... the charges against opposition members and really what they're trying to do is ... bring charges against them ... I have their immunity lifted I have been removed from Congress so they don't remain an impediment to ... the laws that they wanted ... they don't give a way of the so the crazy man through the economy are you you talk about the inflation even the government admitting its own forty percent ... but a nice pose given the way they ... they control of the economy would be even worse if they if you have a real market there yet effective black market inside spiraling out of control and not be ... there something and in Washington called the troubled ... currency project that's run by Johns Hopkins economist ... Steve hanky ... I together with the Cato Institute ... and he says that the implied inflation rate in Venice Whelan rate now is two and fifty percent ... so you can imagine that if you are out working class Venice Whelan ... by you know life is becoming very difficult for you either ... you're paying super high prices for we didn't get or if you try to buy things on her price controls ... you're experiencing a lot of shortages will your family and honestly and they are gets we've been blessed in this country is hard for me to imagine how you can sort of function in an economy with prices rising ... I'm moving more than doubling in a in the year and a ... and then the the the you mention the shortages as well well for example transportation is a big thing and the government controls the price in on buses and and they control the price of gasoline ... I'm so in some sense some of the inflation does not pass through to the pocketbooks of people but ... I think that I'm one of the reasons why a present and I do know is now trying to pass in Congress something he calls ... the enabling law which basically was kid can ... serve dictatorial powers to sit to create things ... on is because he knows that he's going in the running into more and more ... opposition by people because they're starting to feel the pinch of ... this very bad economic model ... okay well let's let's hope that


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MEXICO CITY (AP) – A heart that was dropped on the ground while being transported to a hospital has been successfully transplanted into a 28-year-old hair stylist.
Dr. Jaime Saldivar says Erika Hernandez doesn't yet know that her new heart made national news when a medic stumbled and the plastic-wrapped heart tumbled out of a cooler onto the street two weeks ago.
Saldivar says it will be up to the family to tell her.
A rosy-cheeked Hernandez spoke briefly with reporters on Tuesday and thanked the donor's family, saying "I have no words to express what I'm feeling right now."
Hernandez was born with a congenital heart defect. She received the heart of a man who died in a car accident.
(Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)


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While the buzz is building about New York City mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn, her fiancee Kim Catullo prefers to remain subdued in the background. The two will be wed this month in Manhattan in front of an intimate group of family and friends as more details emerge about the "shy" love of Quinn's life.
Quin, whose grandmother escaped from the sinking Titanic when emigrating from Cork, is favorite to become New York's next mayor.
The New York Post sheds some light on Catullo's humble New Jersey beginnings. Born to two factory workers, Catullo grew up in New Jersey, attending Rutgers University for her undergraduate degree and later Seton Hall Law School. Catullo's mother died of ovarian cancer when Kim was only 17; Quinn's mother died when she was only 16. The two were both then raised by their fathers, both of whom were WWII veterans.
While the two may share similar upbringings, their experience in terms of coming out as lesbians drastically differed. For Kim, it was never a big deal. "I don't remember anything official in terms of Kim coming out," said Kim's friend Lisa Porada, who was Kim's college roommate at Rutgers. "That was just always there. It was never an issue."
Christine, on the other hand, struggled with her sexuality for a long time. She has described her coming out at the age of 25 as "end of a long process."
The two met in September 2001 when they were set up by mutual friends. "For Kim, having someone to share her life with, that was always something she was looking for," said Porada. "I remember hearing about Chris very early on after that date. It was pretty immediate that the two became a serious item."
Preparing for their upcoming wedding is a dream come true for the couple. Christine Quinn famously lobbied for the legalization of gay marriage in New York and saw it passed last June. While their Manhattan nuptials this month could be the perfect opportunity to build some more political momentum for the mayoral hopeful, Christine is deferring to Kim's wishes to have a quiet, more intimate ceremony.
"The end result is a wedding that will reflect Catullo's roots more than Quinn's political future," says the New York Post of Quinn and Catullo's upcoming nuptials.
For the ceremony, Kim is expected to wear a suit and Christine will be donning a gown. The cake is being designed and baked by one of Kim's college freshman year roommate, Lisa Porada of Chocolate Carousel Bakery in Wall, NJ. Porada's daughter Olivia will be singing at the wedding as well.
While the ceremony will be intimate, it won't be devoid of some of New York's biggest political names. The guest list includes Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor Cuomo and Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Catullo is supportive of Quinn's bid for New York mayor, but still has aspirations of her own. Marielle Dugan, one of Kim's best friends during their time at Seton Hall Law School said "Her career is important to her and I'm sure she will pursue her own goals," said Dugan. "But she'll help keep Chris grounded and keep perspective there."


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Friends Historical Library was established in 1871 to collect, preserve, and make available archival, manuscript, printed, and visual records concerning the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) from their origins mid-seventeenth century to the present. >> Search our collections
- Extent of our collections
With more than 45,000 books, pamphlets and serials, 60,000 photographs, 400 major manuscript collections, and 9,000 volumes of original meeting records, Friends Historical Library is one of the outstanding research facilities for the study of Quaker history. The Library also maintains the Swarthmore College Archives and the papers of the Swarthmore Historical Society.
- Research topics
Besides the obvious focus on Quaker history, the holdings are a significant research collection for the regional and local history of the middle-Atlantic region of the United States and the history of American social reform. Quakers played prominent roles in almost every major reform movement in American history, including abolition, African-American history, Indian rights, women's rights, prison reform, humane treatment of the mentally ill, and temperance. The collections also reflect the significant role Friends played in the development of science, technology, education, and business in Britain and America.
- Using the collections
Access policies are designed to provide maximum convenience to researchers consistent with the library's responsibility for preservation of the materials entrusted to its care and reasonable protection of individual privacy. While the Library's primary mission is the support of scholarly research on topics related to Quakers, Friends Historical Library is open to all serious researchers. Only a very small amount of the collection is currently available online.


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This NOAA satellite image taken Wednesday, May 30, 2012 at 4:45 a.m. EDT shows cloud cover along the East Coast as the remains of tropical storm Beryl move through the region dropping heavy rain. The Northeast also sees heavy cloud cover as Tuesday\'s severe thunderstorm outbreak dies down. More clouds are noted in the Southern Plains where more severe weather was reported on Tuesday. (AP PHOTO/WEATHER UNDERGROUND)
CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — The remnants of Tropical Storm Beryl spun off a tornado that destroyed three homes and damaged dozens of others near the North Carolina coast Wednesday as the system sped toward the Atlantic, authorities said.
Between 40 and 50 homes were damaged near Peletier in the western part of Carteret County, said county Emergency Services Director Jo Ann Smith. She said there were no reports of injuries.
Many homes suffered only minor damage, but three were destroyed when the winds came through shortly before noon, she said.
The National Weather Service in Morehead City confirmed Wednesday that a strong EF1 tornado with maximum winds of 110 mph caused the damage.
The remnants of the storm were skimming the North Carolina coast and prompting flood watches in eastern North Carolina. Beryl was expected to gain strength even as it loses its tropical characteristics.
Heavy rains from the storm caused some scattered street and lowland flooding near Wilmington, N.C., as the system approached. Loris., S.C., near the border of the two Carolinas, received more than 3 inches of rain, and radar showed heavy showers along the Interstate 95 corridor in the two states.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami said late Wednesday that Beryl was downgraded to a post-tropical storm and its center was located 40 miles (65 kilometers) west-southwest of Cape Hatteras, N.C., and was moving northeast at 21 mph (33 kph).
The hurricane center warned some additional strengthening was expected over the next couple of days. No coastal tropical cyclone watches or warnings were in effect Wednesday night, forecasters said.
Reid Hawkins, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Wilmington, said rain, not wind, was the concern with the system — and the rain would be welcome. He said Wilmington has received only about 75 percent of its normal rainfall this year.
Beryl came ashore near Jacksonville, Fla., just after midnight on Memorial Day as a tropical storm with 70 mph (113 kph) winds. It dumped 10 inches of rain in some areas of north Florida.
It struck Cumberland Island National Seashore off the Georgia coast. The island, part of the National Park Service, will remain closed to visitors until the weekend to give rangers time to clean up.
Fred Boyles, the island's superintendent, said Wednesday that downed trees and other debris still need to be cleared before Cumberland re-opens Saturday. Rangers evacuated the federally protected wilderness area reachable only by boat last Sunday, well ahead of the tropical storm's landfall.
The island off Georgia's southeast corner gets about 43,500 visitors each year.
Beryl is the second named tropical system of the 2012 Atlantic Hurricane season, which doesn't officially begin until Friday.


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Learners will explore the concept of parallax (the apparent displacement of an object caused by a change in the viewer's position) and then simulate the discovery of Pluto with a Blink Comparator via an online interactive.
Materials Cost: Free
The purpose of this kinesthetic activity is for students to learn the relative motions of the Earth, Sun and Moon. Awareness of these different motions is needed to develop an understanding of the causes of the day/night cycle, the seasons and the... (View More) cycle of lunar phases. This resource is from PUMAS - Practical Uses of Math and Science - a collection of brief examples created by scientists and engineers showing how math and science topics taught in K-12 classes have real world applications. (View Less)
Materials Cost: Free per group of students


text: Vendeur: simonthebeekeeper-global (45.792) 99.6%, Lieu où se trouve: Stoke Golding, Warwickshire, Lieu de livraison: Worldwide, Numéro de l'objet: 251154904951 Other Items Feedbacks About Us Contact Us Follow Us 2 x Beekeepers Ratchet Hive Straps These are very substantial straps Measuring 2.5mm wide ( 1 inch ) and 3 metres ( 10 feet ) long, and will keep your hive VERY TIGHT AND SECURE.If you haven't used these kind of straps before, they are VERY EFFECTIVE in keeping your hives together with absolutely no movement. The straps come with step-by-step instructions as it can be a little confusing on how to use the mechanism !If you have any queries regarding this product, please feel free to contact our Sales/Packaging dept. FULL SATISFACTION OR REFUND OF COURSE ...........Selling beekeeping equipment at affordable prices !! Simon the BeekeeperVAT GB195409676 All purchases are dispatched on a "Next Collection" basis. Collections are every day (Monday to Friday), excluding UK bank holidays. Simon the Beekeeper will take appropriate care to ensure your purchase arrives safely - in the unlikely event of any problems, please feel free to contact our customer services team who will be happy to help. We endeavour to provide the most economical rates for our customers, dependent on current 3rd party shipping rates.. We offer a no quibble 14 day returns policy. Just return the item in it's original condition for exchange or refund. We regret, we are unable to refund returns shipping costs unless the error is on our part or the item is faulty. Paypal Card payment by Telephone Cheque via post (please note - goods will not be dispatched until cheque payment is cleared.) Condition: New, MPN: Does Not Apply, Brand: Simon the Beekeeper, Product Type: Beekeeping equipment


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I don't understand why no one is posting to the message board. I thought this was a viable source of support for a number of people but I am not seeing any activity. Are forums a thing of the past?
Providing Research, Education and Support for Chiari Malformation and Syringomyelia
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Brady's 5th title even more Super with his ailing mother in the stadium
Tom Brady was worried his mother, who has been undergoing chemotherapy and radiation while battling an undisclosed cancer, wouldn't be able to make it to the Super Bowl.
Galynn Brady was there Sunday in Houston, watching her son make history in the most stunning way possible.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft confirmed she was battling an illness after the game.
"I spoke to (Tom) in the locker room before the game, and I said, 'We gotta win this one for your mom,' because I know how important his mom is," Kraft said to NESN. "She's been going through chemotherapy and radiation, and this is the first game she's been to. She came here, and I just saw her, and it was really cool."
Before leading the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history for his record fifth championship, the Patriots quarterback shared a special moment with his mother and father on the field.
It was an emotional week for Brady, who choked up when a young boy asked him who his hero was and said it was his dad.
"It has been a tough year," Brady said Wednesday. "Every family goes through different things and you know my family has always been a great support system for me."
On Monday, Brady called the 34-28 overtime victory over Atlanta a "hell of game" for his mother.


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The Real Club Náutico of Palma Will Host The Melges 32 World Championship In September
3 August 2011
The Melges 32 class has been presented today in Spain on the occasion of its debut in the 30th Copa del Rey Audi Mapfre, a competition the one design fleet expects to attend at least three more years. The class has also announced that the 2011 World Championship will take place in the Real Club Naútico of Palma from the 20th to the 24th of September.
Víctor Mariño, the class representative in Spain, has stressed the rapid growth of the class in Italy, the UK and the U.S.A., with a total of 115 units worldwide, 50 of which are based in Europe. "It's a modern boat, fun but also competitive, demanding and technical," explains Mariño. One design and real time are the future of sailing, and that's what Spain should aim for. The Melges 32 is perfect cause it's simple to launch, transport and maintain," he added.
Melges founder's grandson Harry Melges, III and Europe's CEO Federico Michetti said they expect the class to take part in the Copa del Rey at least three more years. Michetti thanked Bribón-Movistar's boat owner and skipper Marc de Antonio for their support and commitment to a class they have already competed within.
Javier Sanz, president of the Copa del Rey Audi Mapfre organizing committee, expressed the interest of the Real Club Náutico of Palma in becoming one of the hosting venues of the class European circuit which is currently being set up. Barcelona has already been confirmed as one of the host cities.
The 2011 Melges 32 World Championship will take place from the 20th till the 24th of September in Palma de Mallorca. The competition's third edition after Porto Cervo and San Francisco is expected to gather a fleet of 30 to 35 boats, in the words of Víctor Mariño, as well as top sailors from all around the world with Olympic, America's Cup, and Audi MedCup sailing backgrounds.


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Saturday, November 19, 2011
Crane to follow Rangers' model
I think our goal ... is to build the minor league team first and once we have that loaded up and the players start to develop and come up, we will go ahead and sign some free agents as (Rangers) have to help compliment them. We will emulate (the Rangers) model as we try to improve the Astros.
Also contained in the interview is that Crane is exploring moving Spring Training facilities away from Kissimmee, and sharing facilities with the New York Mets.
8 comments:
Just blowing smoke up the collective rears of the Astros deluded fan base. The 'stros will never come close to the Rangers success with the current paradigm management follows.
- November 19, 2011 at 1:39 PM
- OremLK said...
Isn't the whole point that the management is changing? Crane will almost certainly fire Tal Smith, Ed Wade, and many others. There will be a housecleaning.
- November 19, 2011 at 3:15 PM
I fail to see how the plunging budget and trading all the vets is going to lead to success. Hasn't that been the basic stratagem of the Royals?
That's worked out swimmingly...
- November 19, 2011 at 4:52 PM
- OremLK said...
The Royals had the best farm system in baseball coming into last season and will likely see a nice run of success around the middle of this decade as a result. You have to build from the farm up unless you have ridiculously deep pockets (Yankees, Red Sox). The Astros don't have that kind of revenue and never will.
- November 19, 2011 at 5:37 PM
You assume a lot. The Royals have been rebuilding for how long now? If you would be happy with the Astros following that model I can only assume you're a masochist.
- November 19, 2011 at 7:44 PM
- OremLK said...
Guess what other teams built their success building from the farm system up? Every single one which has a payroll under $150M, which last time I checked is every team except Boston and New York.
- November 19, 2011 at 8:22 PM
Let us turn back the clock to 2005. If we were in the AL West at that time, we don't make the World Series for the first time in the history of the franchise. Hell, we don't even sniff the playoffs... The Astros had a shooting chance in the NL. We are now going to be another also-ran in the AL bottom feeders at best, and a boost to the Rangers win column at worst.
- November 19, 2011 at 10:09 PM
- Reuben said...
So, because the Angels had a better record than the Astros in 2005, that means they have no hope of competing in the AL ever? That's faulty logic right there.
I do agree with you that if the Astros emulate the Royals and Pirates of the 2000's, it will be terrible. But I think (hope) that's not their plan.
- November 20, 2011 at 12:09 AM


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Evans Mojito Claims Lead At Melges 24 Atlantic Coast Championship, Bacardi Miami Sailing Week
8 March 2013
Miami, FL - The 2013 Melges 24 Atlantic Coast Championship, being held in conjunction with Studio Milano's Bacardi Miami Sailing Week, greeted the fleet with a cool morning. Unfortunately due to little breeze the race committee was only able to run one of the three races scheduled for the 18 teams in attendance.
Due to painfully light air, the start of the race determined the winner for the first race of the series. Catharine Evans on Mojito led the charge early and was able to extend for the win. Evans and crew of Ron Hyatt, Steve Liebel, Doug Nickel, and Coleen Walsh took the bullet as to become both overnight and Corinthian Division leader. A huge congratulations are in order for this phenomenal team.
Also, battling the light air conditions, Field aboard WTF stayed on the stern of of Evans the entire race, followed closely by Don Wilson's Convexity. Bent Dietrich from Germany on Kleine Rainbow did not go unnoticed barely missing the podium for the first race but is in good standing to do very well in the series.
The runner up for the corinthian division is Rob Britts and crew sailing Hot Mess who have great placement heading into day two, and are followed up by Curtis Jazwiecki and crew on Gnarly Ruca.
The Melges Performance Sailing De-Brief Session presented by EFG Bank was a huge success. Teams picked up their MELGES ROCKS T-Shirts in anticipation of the MELGES ROCKS party happening Friday, March, 8 at 8:30 until at Mr. Moe's in the Grove. Teams are strongly encouraged to wear their MELGES ROCKS shirt for free drinks!
Real-time updates will be posted online at the Official Facebook Page of the U.S. Melges 24 Class Association. Look for reports on who is winning and what is going on. Tune in and stay on top of all the latest news from Bacardi.
TOP FIVE RESULTS (After one race)
1.) Catherine Evans, Mojito
2.) Alan Field, WTF
3.) Don Wilson, Convexity
4.) Bent Dietrich, Kleine Rainbow
5.) Bruce Ayers, Monsoon
TOP THREE CORINTHIANS (After one race)
1.) Catherine Evans, Mojito
2.) Rob Britts, Hot Mess
3.) Curtis Jazwiecki, Gnarly Ruca
View Full Results
View The Official Website of Bacardi Miami Sailing Week
View The Official Race Site (Results)
View Full Photo Gallery - JOY


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Students may choose to write a comprehensive review article as first author discussing and analyzing an aspect of recently published data on a specific topic related to Translational/Basic Science. The topic must be approved by your mentor, and you should work closely with them to outline the scope of your efforts and research question. The comprehensive review should reflect a topic of significant interest to the field and be suitable for publication.
The comprehensive review article should have the following components:
This type of review should be 25-30 double-spaced pages with some figures and/or schematics tying the information together. This differs from other research papers, but is suitable as an SP.
Original Research Paper:
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"Yes, Saints Row is that game with the dildo. That's exactly what it is, if you mentioned "the purple dildo bat" everyone knows you are talking about Saints Row. You cannot buy that sort of marketing and brand recognition and you certainly wouldn't get it in a 'Michael Mann / HEAT / Collateral / Training Day' type of game."
The headline should read
In Defence Of Cliffy B And Saints Row 3 !
And it certainly wont put up grand theft auto numbers! Oh and didn't its publisher just collapse in financial ruin despite that "You cannot buy that sort of marketing and brand recognition"? The game is not serious and was not taken serious. I got nothing against the game, but this is a joke!