The Mad Scientist of Baltimore

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

12 June 15

n my travels recently I met someone so interesting, I haven't been able to forget him. It's just too bad that what Kato Simeto really needs is a venture capitalist, not a journalist. But it would be a shame if nobody outside of Baltimore ever heard his story.

Simeto was introduced to me by a friend of a friend in the days after the Baltimore protests. I didn't know the city and I needed someone to show me what happened and where, for a story I ended up writing in the wake of the Freddie Gray incident, about community policing.

A secondary motive for me (and I'm a little embarrassed to admit this) was my obsession with the show The Wire. Simeto, I knew, had been involved peripherally in the making of HBO's true-crime epic, working as a fixer of sorts and having been an extra in multiple scenes.

Fanatics can spot him as a SWAT team member in the Season Two raid. He's also in the dogfighting scene of the classic "All Due Respect" episode, looking on with a frown as Method Man's Cheese Wagstaff character rips off his "That ain't nothing but bait" line.

Anyway, Simeto took me around in Baltimore, I did my thing, and one night we got together for a drink. He said he had something on his mind. I figured it was a pitch for a movie or a book. Instead, he told me a wild story about a world-altering project he was trying to put together in his backyard.

He wanted, he said, to become the first African-American automaker, and had spent years designing an ultramodern, green-energy prototype car.

"It's going to be the greenest car in history," he said. "It's an electric car and a solar car. And a wind-powered car. It's going to use transparent luminescent solar collectors for windows. And then it's going to be covered with supermaterials to help catch wind energy. Wind turbines, to charge the battery…"

He spilled into a long rant of ultra-technical gibberish. I had trouble following him. Finally, I interrupted.

"Wait," I said. "Are you the engineer on all of this? You're designing all of these things?"

He shook his head in irritation, like I wasn't listening. He knew his own story by heart and was way ahead of me.

"No, it's not like that," he said. "I'll get one person to make this part, another person to make that. I'll just put it all together. Nobody will really know what the whole machine is except me."

I felt a wave of déjà vu. I'd seen this act before, in the movie The Fly, when teleportation machine inventor Seth Brundle explained to a reporter how he farmed out the details: "Build me a laser this, a molecular analyzer that…"

This was exactly the same mad-scientist act, only it was from a guy who'd checked Method Man's gun at a Baltimore dogfight, not Jeff Goldblum.

Then he showed me a picture on his iPad. Simeto's "Ulozi Motors" sports car was a gorgeous looking vehicle, like a space-age version of a Jag or a Lamborghini, with a hint of DeLorean tossed in. He had a whole series of pictures of the long-hooded luxury sedan posed on country highways, sunlight gleaming off its superhydrophobic, corrosion-controlling waterproof coating.

I took one second to look it over, then blinked.

"Wait a minute," I said. "You built this thing?"

He laughed. "Nah. It's just a picture I made. But I can build it. I've got an old Porsche in my backyard that I can use for the frame."

Simeto went on to show me some of his other invention ideas. His "Ulozi" brand is already a clothing line. He hand-designs t-shirts, jeans, hats and other stuff, all bearing a slick and distinctive sunburst logo. "It's how I pay the bills," he said, laughing.

He showed me photos of some of the famed Wire cast members wearing his clothes. I wondered how many hats and sneakers one could sell with Omar Little fronting the fashion line.

He branched out into gadgets. His Ulozi car, which he superstitiously refuses to give a model name – "I don't want to jinx it" – comes standard with a series of accessories, like an umbrella with a gas spring.

"It just pops out with a gust of air, no little parts," he said, describing the James Bond-like contraption.

He showed pictures of other doo-dads: watches, backpacks, a combination luggage-stroller and phone charger that looks like a folded-up drum set.

Even the Ulozi store of his imagination is a technological wonder. In fact, it looks a little like an homage to season 2 of The Wire: a series of shipping containers staggered on top of one another, powered by solar and wind energy.

As I listened to Simeto I became very aware of two things. The first was that I was absolutely the wrong person for him to be talking to. I don't have a line to big money, and I wouldn't have the remotest clue as to the technological or financial feasibility of his car project.

The second thing, though, was just a sense of amazement at the level of detail of Simeto's inventions. If half the battle is perfecting the dream, he's won half the battle. Over the years, his mind has raced over every inch of his wonder car, inside and out, to the point where the fantasy itself is a thing of beauty. Everyone who meets him and hears his pitch just wants to see the car in real life, just once.

Simeto has no illusions. He knows how high a mountain he'd have to climb to get a project as involved and expensive as an automobile built. He recognizes what a longshot it is to ever fulfill his dream of being the first inner-city entrepreneur to go beyond music and fashion and into heavy industry.

But that doesn't mean all his goals are pie in the sky. He's got that Porsche in his backyard and is ready to start tearing it apart. Even if he never gets to be an auto magnate with a string of factories, he still has a great shot of one day owning the world's coolest car.

He tells me he'd almost be happy if he could just get that one prototype built – if he could just see it once, on the road.

"I have to get a prototype built to be taken seriously," he says. "I want to create something that will last long after I'm gone."

Who Else Knew About Dennis Hastert's Cover-Up?

By Frank Rich, New Yorker Magazine

12 June 15

ost weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week, the magazine asked him about the case against former Speaker Dennis Hastert, Lindsey Graham's reception to Caitlyn Jenner, and the Tony Awards.

It now appears that the former House speaker Dennis Hastert sexually abused at least two students during his years (1965–1981) as a teacher and wrestling coach in the farm town of Yorkville, Illinois: “Individual A,” whom he tried to silence with $3.5 million in hush money according to the indictment that brought this story into the open, and Steve Reinboldt, who died of AIDS in 1995 and whose story was told by his younger sister to ABC News. As the circle widens, what's the chance that some of Hastert's congressional colleagues have knowledge of a cover-up — beyond scant rumors — and that one will eventually come forward?

We are talking about two potential cover-ups here. One may involve Hastert’s own actions: Did colleagues know about his past and look the other way? One former congressman, Mel Watt of North Carolina, has suggested as much. But the more important cover-up involves the House of Representatives as an institution. Did some of the Congressional leadership during Hastert’s reign behave as odiously (and perhaps as illegally) as the hierarchies of the Catholic Church and Penn State when confronted with a perpetrator of sexual abuse in their own ranks?

The latter case centers on Mark Foley, the former Florida congressman who resigned in the fall of 2006 after the exposure of predatory, sexually explicit emails and instant messages he sent to male congressional pages. Foley was said to have trolled pages inappropriately as far back as 1995. After the scandal became public, both journalists and House Ethics Committee investigators found that Hastert, the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House in the chamber’s history, had remained “willfully ignorant” (as the Ethics report had it) about repeated reports of Foley’s transgressions. Indeed, Coach Hastert seems to have adopted a see-no-evil defense akin to Coach Joe Paterno’s. But unlike Paterno, he was able to slip away quietly, departing Congress after Foley’s exit. Writing about the case in Vanity Fair in 2007, Gail Sheehy quoted a source who accused Hastert of having “attempted a cover-up” of his dereliction of duty in the Foley case — a cover-up that involved coordination with John Boehner (then the majority leader), Roy Blunt (then majority whip, now a senator), and Thomas Reynolds (a New York congressman who also slinked away into retirement in the scandal’s aftermath). If the church and Penn State could finally clean house, surely the House of Representatives must do the same. Whether it does or not, a press exhumation of this case may well come to haunt the 2016 election.

Unlike some other conservatives, Lindsey Graham, now officially a presidential candidate, has welcomed Caitlyn Jenner (and invited her to join the GOP!) with relative grace. Are you surprised by his comments?Not quite as surprised as I am by Graham’s candidacy itself. It’s hard to know his rationale for running since his only distinctive policy priority seems to be to gin up all-out war with Iran, a non-starter with most voters, and his only political distinction is his potential status as the first bachelor on a presidential ticket since the 19th century, a non-starter in the family values party. (He has explained that he will fill the family gap by having a “rotating First Lady” in the White House, though given that he’s proposed only one woman for this role, his sister, maybe he means “rotating” like on a rotisserie.) By welcoming Caitlyn Jenner to the GOP — a distinction he shares only with George Pataki in his party’s field — Graham would seem to be further aspiring to rock bottom of the Republican primary pack. The default conservative line on Jenner is to view her as an avatar for yet another liberal media conspiracy to normalize “really marginal behavior” (as Rush Limbaugh put it) and to erode the religious freedom of America’s persecuted Christian majority.

After the Diane Sawyer interview, the prevailing joke had it that the real scoop was not that the then-Bruce Jenner came out as transgender but as a Republican. Asked by Sawyer if she would advocate for LGBT rights to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, Jenner responded, "In a heartbeat, why not? And I think they'd be very receptive to it." What if Caitlyn Jenner followed through? That would immediately elevate the GOP primary contest in both substance and drama (and, just possibly, farce).

After television's recent up-and-down results with live musicals, the Tonys brought the real thing. How'd they do?If you are judging solely by the numbers, the Tonys were a disaster: an audience of 6.35 million viewers (down from 7.05 million last year) for CBS as opposed to the audiences NBC drew for its live presentations of The Sound of Music (nearly 22 million) and Peter Pan (9.2 million). But if you are judging by the amount of embarrassing showbiz kitsch per square inch, the Tonys more than delivered. The big innovation this year was supposed to be the fashion intervention of Anna Wintour, who took control of the wardrobes of the Broadway celebrities (or semi-celebrities) so that they wouldn’t look as if they’d just stepped out of a community theater production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. But even she lacked the power to stop Alan Cumming, who co-hosted the ceremony with Kristin Chenoweth, from appearing in shorts for the first span of the evening. Cumming apparently was operating under the delusion that he was being stylish and youthful as opposed to tedious and middle-aged.

The show had a few honestly good moments, particularly toward the end. Larry David was a hilarious presenter, taking the opportunity to blame anti-Semitism for the failure of his own play, Fish in the Dark, to secure a single Tony nomination. Michael Cerveris was modest and direct in accepting his award for his performance in Fun Home. And Kelli O’Hara, the least divalike of Broadway divas, was touching both in her irresistible duet with Ken Watanabe in “Shall We Dance?” from The King and I and in her giddy yet human-scaled response to her Tony win. She was a much-needed antidote to Helen Mirren, who had kicked off the evening with a cold, over-rehearsed, personality-free reaction to her own victory.

But tastelessness was the biggest Tony victor, as usual. A teacher named Corey Mitchell was presented with some sort of award for theatrical education but no one paid him the honor of telling the audience who he was, what he did to earn his Tony, or even where he taught. An appearance by Josh Groban, incessantly promoted all evening, turned out to consist of a mediocre rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” in which the close-up shots of his pious warbling were allowed to upstage the luminaries ostensibly being saluted in the “In Memoriam” section. R.I.P. indeed.