VICE (2013) s01e05 Episode Script

This week on "Vice" Ryan meets polygamy's teenage outcasts.
I don't know where to go, how to start.
What do I do? And then we send Thomas to Mauritania where thin is ugly _ and fat is beautiful.
And then I travel to India So clear-cut, because it's poverty and then super rich.
to see how their 99% have been affected by the global economic crisis.
_ The world is changing.
Now, no one knows where it's going.
But we'll be there uncovering the news It's World War III.
culture and politics that expose the absurdity of the modern condition.
That little child has a huge gun.
This scene isn't really kosher by American standards.
I was interviewing suicide bombers and they were kids.
This is the world through our eyes.
We win or we die! This is the world of "Vice".
Hi.
I'm Shane Smith, and we're here in the "Vice" Offices in Brooklyn, New York.
For our first story this week, we go to Arizona and Utah.
When Warren Jeffs was arrested and sent away for life, most of us assumed that the story would end there.
Now, 5 years after his conviction for having sex with reports have surfaced that Jeffs is still ruling his polygamist community.
He's just doing it from prison.
So we sent Ryan to the heart of polygamy country to see what happens when a lunatic runs an entire town from his jail cell.
_ And in your teenage years, you will be tested.
Are you listening to the Gentile music? Then you don't have the spirit of God.
Are you watching the Gentile movies? How can you be trusted with a family? Warren Jeffs is the pedophile polygamist leader of the FLDS, the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints, a radical offshoot of Mormonism.
Jeffs is currently serving a 130-year jail sentence for his 2011 conviction of child sex and bigamy charges, including the sexual assault of his 12- and 15-year-old brides.
You know, whether it's directly or indirectly, they're still getting all their marching orders from Warren Jeffs in Texas Prison.
Jeffs has banned bicycles, ordered all children's toys to be destroyed, and recently made yet another strange declaration.
It is polygamy gone berserk.
Only 15 men will be allowed to father children with the thousands of eligible FLDS women.
As the prophet, he controls everything-- jobs, money, property, and most importantly, who his followers can marry, because the number of wives a man has is the most crucial element of the Fundamentalist Mormon.
In fact, Jeffs himself is thought to have up to 78 wives.
Having multiple wives is so important that only higher-ranking elders are allowed to start families, And that leaves the younger men in the community with a problem: grade school math.
In order to practice polygamy, you have a guy with 50 wives, gotta go somewhere.
Roman was only 18 when he was exiled from the church.
They wanna get him out, so they kick him out for absolutely any reason.
You know, you watch a movie, you talk to a girl, you listen to music, they kick you out.
The nearest cities, is where they go to.
St.
George, Salt Lake.
Lately they've been going up to the oil refineries in North Dakota because the money's good up there and they don't have to have an education, because most of them don't have even an 8th grade education.
So there's a whole community of ex-FLDS kids that live here in Salt Lake now.
They hang out together all the time.
Some of them are getting together for some pizza and beer and they invited us to join.
I seriously didn't masturbate till 6 months after I left.
Want to know what's funny, dude? How old were you? How did you stay away from your dick? I peed out of it.
That's all I knew.
I started when I was 11.
I felt so guilty.
That's the worst part.
When you grow up in the vacuum of the FLDS, things that most of us think of as common knowledge, like paying bills, using the internet, or even wearing bathing suits are completely alien to them.
These kids are shockingly unprepared for the most mundane of tasks in everyday life.
My dad, he kept on telling me, "If you don't stop texting, or don't stop-- "you keep buying Internet for your phone, you're going to have to be kicked out of the house.
" I called up Sam, my older brother, and he came and picked me up that night.
What was that first night like, when you decided to call your brother? I don't know where to go, how to start.
What do I do? How long does that last? How long does it take to feel like-- It took me, I'm going to say, 2 1/2, 3 years.
To feel just comfortable here.
Wayne and Joe offered to show us around their hometown of Colorado City.
You really can't explain the way that you feel the first day you leave.
There's no words to describe the feeling.
You're scared, you're terrified, but you're excited all at the same time.
To them, they think we're the worst people.
Like fuck you, you're brainwashed, I'm better than you.
Wayne and Joe told us about some kids who'd been thrown out, just like them.
But instead of running away as far as they could, they stayed in Colorado City, a few blocks from the families that now refuse to acknowledge them.
You know what happens when you grow up with like 30 brothers? You play really aggressive sports.
I'm up.
- Oh! - Nice.
So these kids live in what they call butthuts: small trailers that house a bunch of kids who are totally unequipped to deal with everyday life.
Leroy lives just down the street from the family that now won't even speak to him.
It hurts a lot, seeing families torn, and there's nothing I can do about it but carry on with my life.
Leroy was just 15 when he was thrown out of the church and his family.
This is the house that I was raised in.
That's a 3-story house.
We had a mother on each floor.
So we had a family of about 30 people.
I had been talking to girls and wearing what I wanted and stuff, and that's against the religion, you know? So I came home from work and father came up to me and said, "The bishop called and he wants you to get your things and leave.
" I said, "OK, tonight? Like, it's already 6:00, He was like, "Yeah.
" So that's what I did.
I kind of felt like I died.
I wondered how could my parents just let me go into a world that they don't even know.
So this kid, who's barely been to school, has never traveled more than a few miles from his home, and has been taught since birth that outsiders are pure evil, is basically given 20 minutes to pack and told to get out forever.
On their birthdays, I do my best to call and sometimes I get rejected and told to never call again, but I'm gonna keep it up.
Even if they've done their best to forget me, I'm not forgetting them.
During our conversation with Leroy, we couldn't help but notice we were being followed.
You guys know the story on God's squad, don't you? Once Gentiles are in town, people start following them around for hours and make sure that you're not gonna do anything that's gonna hurt the community.
_ _ Even after being out of the church for years, these kids are still afraid of church security.
The longer we stayed there, a bunch of things that seemed kind of quiet and quaint when we first arrived, started feeling really creepy.
A whole bunch of people turning their backs, running inside, and circling around in pickup trucks.
It's Little House on the Prairie mixed with Children of the Corn all being run by a convicted pedophile from a jail cell states away.
What the fuck? My honest opinion is I don't think Warren's as bad as he's put out to be.
Honestly.
I'm grateful that I was raised the way I am, and he hasn't done anything to my family or me to hurt me.
But he took your family from you.
Yeah, but it was because that's part of the religion.
I mean what's religion if it doesn't have standards? Everybody that's been raised in this religion knows that the outside world is a huge, bad, mixed-up place.
We kept asking ourselves, how could this possibly happen in America? Is the FLDS a cult? Yes.
In my mind, it's a cult.
He could seriously tell one one of his loyal followers to go kill somebody, and they'd go do it thinking it was the right thing to do.
The problem is we're not just talking about one person here.
We're talking about a town full of brainwashed followers.
You know, someone such as Warren Jeffs that has control over the community, you have to take very seriously, and I find he's very dangerous because you never know what kind of edict he could come up with out of prison.
And with Warren's jail cell orders getting stranger and stranger, it may just turn out that these young men with no families and grim prospects, are far better off in exile.
West Africa's Mauritania is one of the poorest countries in the world.
On top of that, only .
5% of its land can be used for farming.
And on top of that, the country's been suffering from a worsening food crisis for the past few years.
So when we heard they're currently experiencing an obesity epidemic and that this epidemic was actually self-inflicted, we sent Thomas there to see what is going on.
_ _ Hi.
It's Thomas.
It's midnight in the Sahara.
We're eating, um, camel milk and millet to get fat and beautiful.
West Africa has never made any bones about its preference for thick chicks.
_ Unfortunately, Mauritania's recurrent famine and general lack of resources make it nearly impossible to pack on the pounds.
Never mind the fact that it's smack in the middle of the Sahara, an environment so harsh you basically shed weight any time you're not indoors lying down.
The only way for girls out here to meet Mauritanian beauty standards is for their moms to literally force feed them full of milk and food.
It's similar to how you make fois gras.
In fact, they use the same term for both: gavage.
_ _ _ _ Aminetou Mint Ely is an expert on Mauritania's forcefeeding fixation.
_ We're going to head out now to the desert, to a Mauritanian fat camp.
I'm going to take part and basically going to be drinking several liters of camel milk a day, eating as much millet as I can keep down without barfing.
We're at a fish market right now, and I'm trying to find a scale so we can do a little weigh-in to see kind of get a precise figure on how beautiful they can make me in 2 days.
Starting weight: I'm at which I think is a nice weight.
I'm going to do and see what that does to me.
Doesn't seem like the best place on Earth to be chugging milk, but I guess that's, you know, that's the whole point of it.
You gotta suffer for your looks.
This is my gavage mate Hanan, a 19-year-old Mauritanian girl who's starting to get serious about landing a husband.
We started chitchat over an appetizer of breadcrumbs drenched in olive oil.
OK, just go? So basically you take this like a pill and just ball it up and then _ It's all right.
How many times have you done this? _ Did you want to do it or did your mother make you do it? _ _ _ Then we moved on to a light lunch of goat meat, bread, and another bowl of milk to open up the stomach.
My first sip of camel milk was a little underwhelming.
It seemed especially watered down for what I was expecting, almost like a super skim.
Not bad so far, it's like a Mauritanian French dip.
It's really a light start.
The meat's kind of doing stuff to my head, but other than having like goat fat all over my hands, I feel all right.
It just feels like a big meal.
So far I didn't get what the big deal was with gavage.
It just felt like basic overeating.
I mean, my whole country overeats.
That night, however, the real feeding began.
The camel skim I had gotten used to was replaced with camel cream, warm camel cream.
I was starting to process the true nature of gavage, as well as way too much milk.
_ _ _ Ah, this is insane.
_ I did already.
_ _ It feels like the food has filled my entire chest cavity and is now deflating my lungs.
I don't know what I was thinking with this.
Oh, I do not feel good at all.
It's very breathtaking, visually, to wake up to this, but I'm still full of milk despite having pissed like 8 times.
I was gonna ask "What's for breakfast?" but There's kind of like a frat hazing element to this.
Bravo.
Eating wasn't even a chore at this point.
It was punishment.
I definitely passed the point I would have stopped about 8 bites ago.
_ _ _ _ Hurt doesn't begin to cover my personal hell of milk and desert heat.
OK, I just puked twice in my mouth.
Oh, shit.
Oh, God, I really don't feel goodguys.
Oh! Ugghh! Now that we were barf buddies, Hanan seemed a lot more sympathetic to me, even though what I'd gone through was only a sliver of the full gavage experience.
_ I think that if I did two more days, I'd probably die.
The thing is, what we've just been through with Hanan is the voluntary rich girl version of gavage.
In some parts of the desert, parents still start forcefeeding their daughters as toddlers and crush their toes with pincers if they resist.
Gavage isn't just the desert milk-chugging ritual.
Gavage is an entire lifestyle of overeating.
You have 2 to 3 lunches daily.
You stay inside and try not to move.
You don't have a job.
If you have daughters when you're married, would you do you think you would do gavage with them? _ I think it's about time to go back to the scale now and see how much damage two days of this can do to you.
So I was 55 before, and I am now 59.
It's about 10 pounds, so I mean, if you multiply that by doing it week after week after week and making it your lifestyle, this is nuts.
This is the most insane crash dieting.
In a way, fashion and beauty has always been about trying to make yourself the opposite of what you actually are.
In the West, rich people dress in torn jeans and try to look like they can't get enough to eat, while our poor leave the tags on their clothes so you know how much they overpaid for them.
So why should it be surprising then, in a landscape designed to make you skinny, the best way to boost your image is to slam milk until you are obese.
It shouldn't be a surprise.
Just a little gross.
Wealth disparity in the U.
S.
has become a very hot topic recently.
The 99% versus the 1% became a rallying cry that was adopted almost instantaneously.
The growing gap between rich and poor is a global issue, but in the slums of Mumbai, where over 11 million residents live in poverty, the contrast is startling.
So I went to India to see just how bad it really is.
_ India is home to the highest number of poor people in the world, with over living below the poverty line.
And India's largest city, Mumbai, is home to an estimated 22 million people, half of which live in slums.
This means that 4 times the population of Chicago is living in absolute squalor.
Now contrast this with the fact that Mumbai is also home to the largest and most expensive single-family dwelling on Earth.
India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani's billion-dollar personal palace is a 27-story, that takes over 600 employees just to maintain it day to day.
And if that's not freaky enough, this futuristic mega-super-mansion actually looks down on some of the worst slums in the world.
_ - How are you? - Hi.
- Good to see you! - Same to you.
Where are we right now? _ And how many people live in it? A million people live in this slum.
How many people in Mumbai live in slums? _ So, 11 million people living in slums.
Can you show us around? _ So, a million people live here.
What are their qualities that they live under? _ _ _ - Right now, I'm smoking-- - You smoke? No, but I'm smoking with you right now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We are smoking, yeah.
_ How much would it cost to live here? _ _ _ _ _ Right.
_ _ _ So they all work there, and they all live there? - Yes.
Yeah.
- At the same time.
- Because they can't pay rent.
- Yes.
_ But how would you even live in there, though? _ _ - Yeah, maybe the world.
- Yeah.
So there's open sewers everywhere.
It smells quite pungent.
In fact, it's estimated that there's only one working toilet for every 1,400 people living in the slum.
If TV were scratch-and-sniff, then everyone would be barfing right now.
It smells so bad, it's shocking.
I don't know what just fell on me, but it's not good.
_ _ _ _ _ - They make new plastic out of it.
- Right.
_ Not great, no.
So they've got all the shit plastic from all over Mumbai, and they bring it here to the slum, and then they just sort of, by hand, recycle it.
Insane.
There's no real roads, there's just winding alleyway after winding alleyway, which wouldn't be so bad except there's over a million people that live in this slum.
And around every corner, it seemed that there was something even more shocking.
There were young kids working in the dark, running makeshift machines that were retooling waste metal.
And as we walked around, I realized that the whole economy of Dharavi is based on the garbage of the real economy of Mumbai.
Everywhere you looked, people were trying to make something, anything, to sell or trade, desperately trying to make some money out of the waste of the real world.
Because it's so wind-y, there's no real roads, we're gonna go up on the roof and see if we can see the slum.
I don't know if this is up to safety code.
How far does the slum go? It's huge.
_ Right in the middle of Mumbai.
It reminds me of like "Mad Max" or something, where they were living off garbage and fixing the garbage.
Or, do you remember in "Star Wars", do you know when they go down into the garbage? If you jumped in there there'd be like an eye come up and then go after you.
So, you have all these people living in the slum, they sleep under their sewing machines.
What do they think about a guy has a billion- dollar house? _ _ _ _ Yeah.
_ Now, do you think people who live in the building, who are swimming in the swimming pool feel bad when they look down and they see people sleeping in the streets? _ _ _ _ _ _ Yeah, yeah.
_ It's too much gap.
There's too much gap.
After spending some time in Dharavi, we wanted to see how the proverbial 1% live in the skyscrapers that reign these slums.
So we hooked up with a textile magnate named Gautam Singhania to show us around Mumbai in his private helicopter.
So, how many million people live in Mumbai? _ _ _ _ Gautam is your quintessential complete with a fleet of yachts, aptly named after James Bond films, massive houses, and, of course, a stable filled with the world's fastest cars.
Wow.
So this is a Ferrari, I know that much.
Yeah, it's the 458 Italia.
This was the first 458 that came to India.
So you got the first one.
Yes.
This is an 07 Gallardo, which has been modified.
It's got twin turbos.
It's fast, trust me.
Do you actually ever drive the cars? We drive every weekend.
There's a supercar club that we have, and it's a bunch of guys who love cars.
When we go in the club with the boys, it's always good to know you have the power under your foot.
Sure.
Are we gonna go take one on the road? Sure, let's go.
And how did you fall in love with cars first? I guess it's in your DNA.
Here we go.
You get a lot of stares when you drive around the streets of Mumbai? That's why we formed the supercar club you know.
The point of the club is that when we guys used to go out, you know, just one of us, two of us, three of us, so many people used to stand and, you know, look.
And we just figured that, it's just much easier when we have everybody together.
Now, maybe it was because we were driving around Mumbai in a quarter of a million dollar supercar, but Gautam did not seem to want to talk about the obvious disparity of wealth in the city.
Now, what do people think about Mukesh's house? _ _ _ And so you're building a house but you don't want to talk about it.
- Yeah.
- OK, that's OK.
Because of the bad publicity that Mukesh Ambani had enjoyed because of his house, Singhania didn't really want to talk about the new home he was building.
He did let slip, however, that his personal private skyscraper was actually going to be 10 stories higher than Ambani's and have not one, but two Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Mumbai perfectly exemplifies the growing gap between rich and poor, but the problem is actually a global one.
Even the old Communist societies of Russia and China, have now morphed into arguably the most capitalist countries in the world.
It seems that in our modern age, there are very few places left on earth where the rich aren't getting richer and the poor poorer.
When you see it in Mumbai, it's so clear-cut because it's poverty and people living off the garbage of the other society and the other economy.
And the other half are building skyscrapers into the sky and living on megayachts and flying into them on helicopters.
And you say, "What's happening to the world?" Half of the world is living off the garbage of the other half in this post-apocalyptic nightmare.