The New Yorker Presents (2015) s01e10 Episode Script
Episode 10
1 [theme.]
[yowls.]
[swing.]
Man: As far back as I could remember, I always wanted to be a detective.
For 25 years, I was a special agent with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Not many people could say they helped put a serial killer nurse and doctor behind bars for the rest of their natural lives.
Now I'm a private investigator, and I'm also the President of the Society of Professional Investigators, otherwise known as SPI.
Hi, guys.
Have a seat.
Each month, my SPIs get together at Forlini's which hasn't changed since 1943.
Hi, Emmanuelle.
You know Dr.
Wellner? It's the perfect setting for investigators, where top New York City law enforcement officials can dine alongside it's most notorious defendants.
- Would you like one, sir? - Sure.
Please.
It's like I have two families.
And like most families, we got some interesting characters.
Had a really neat case of a neurologist in Pittsburgh who poisoned his wife.
[laughter.]
Dr.
Michael Wellner, the George Clooney of forensic psychiatry.
We met at a conference on serial killers.
Didn't you tell me once a case about a guy who slept in a coffin? Yes.
He ate raw fish, not sushi, and he slept in a coffin, which was kept in the back of the hearse that he drove around in.
[laughter.]
Charlie Iadanza, straight out of Guys and Dolls, and likewise for the characters he encounters on the streets.
This lapel pin can actually record video and audio.
Does it have a zoom lens like mine? [laughter.]
P.
I.
is a unique set of humanity.
We have a motto.
If they're alive, we serve them.
If they're dead, we'll tell you where they're buried.
We walk, talk, eat, and sleep investigations.
You know, I don't know if any of you have got this feeling that the world is nasty and evil and there's nothing to be done about it.
Barbara Butcher, aptly named, is a death investigator.
Only a real butcher has witnessed the brutality she has.
My Christmas Eve night of horrors? I get called up to the Bronx, pull up to the scene, and I hear a woman screaming and screaming.
They said, "That's Maria.
" I went upstairs, and in this apartment, under the Christmas tree, is a guy wrapped up in duct tape, and on him is a big tag that says, - "You're next, Maria.
" - Ooh.
For SPIs, our hunger for good Italian is only second to our hunger for justice.
People are liberal, they donate to charity, yet they still think it's okay to steal from their landlord.
Bill Golodner, the Popeye Doyle of SPI.
He could get a confession out of a mime.
We had a landlord who believed that the tenant was actually living way down in South Jersey.
We found out that this guy was an enormous baseball fan.
So we did an undercover operation where I posed as a film producer doing a film about baseball.
We spoke to this guy, and he says, "Oh, I go to 30 games a year.
" I said, "That's interesting.
How do you drive all the way back down here?" He says, "Oh, I have an apartment in Manhattan.
" "It's a rent-controlled apartment, and I'm really not supposed to have it.
" This guy was like, it was one slap to make him talk and twenty to make him shut up.
- [laughter.]
- Within two weeks, they were getting their keys back to the apartment.
Man: We came across this one story down in the Meatpacking District.
This is when the Meatpacking lived up to its reputation.
No pun intended.
Paul Babakitis-- This former NYPD sergeant spent a career dominating drug lords, prostitutes, and gamblers.
We sent our undercover in to this location to investigate an allegation of S&M activity and prostitution.
Normally, we give our undercover, like, 10 minutes.
If they don't come out, we're going in.
We're gonna take the door down and raid the place.
Our undercover doesn't come out, because he was hanging by the rafters from one arm to the other, and this woman was whipping his butt.
- [laughter.]
- It was insane.
It's past my bedtime.
I want to thank everybody for coming.
I'll see you all in October.
Have a great night, everybody.
[applause.]
I don't think anyone of us would trade in what we do.
For us to live any other way is nuts.
It's nice to know I get to live the rest of my life like a snoop.
[piano.]
Woman: When I tried to put the last 12 days into a few words, I thought it was impossible.
Then I realized it actually comes down to something so simple.
It's always been you.
They say that a successful marriage requires falling in love many times with the same person, and I can't think of a more perfect way to describe how I feel about you.
I can't imagine life without you.
You're the only person that knows me better than I know myself.
You know my faults, my little quirks, and instead of trying to change me, you love me and want to marry me.
Turns out, dreams do come true.
With this ring, I thee wed.
With this ring, I thee wed.
As a symbol of my love and commitment to you.
As a symbol of my love and commitment to you.
With this ring, I thee wed.
Congratulations, and you may kiss your bride.
[Woman speaks native language on P.
A.
.]
Man: If you really wanna get to know a country, become a perp in it.
November 2014, I'm invited to Havana, Cuba, to take part in the first TED Talk in the country's history.
My topic is a sensitive one-- U.
S.
-Cuba relations-- so I feel a special pressure to get things right.
Like any city, Havana presents a certain image to visitors, but I wanna get past all that, so I get off the beaten path to talk directly to Cubans about their country, America, and everything in between.
I wanna improve my Spanish.
As an American in Cuba, you quickly realize how little you actually know of this country you've heard so much about.
Teachers, artists, doctors-- I talked to people across the spectrum.
One thing I learn is, in a country where the average person makes 30 bucks a month, everybody's gotta hustle to survive.
After decades of political and economic isolation, Havana's one-time grandeur seems weary and rundown, but not its people.
For them, survival has become a way of life.
They call it "La Lucha"-- or the fight.
Culturally, Cuba is alive, thriving and transforming.
Despite ongoing human rights concerns, the overriding sense you get from people is of a nation in transition.
In nearly every conversation I have, Cuba's relationship with America naturally arises.
But what's striking is that, for Cubans, the last 60 years have been just one chapter in a long saga of adversity and reinvention.
With my talk a few days off, I decide to get out of the city and venture into the countryside.
There are growing rumors of a possible thaw in U.
S.
-Cuba relations, and I'm starting to think this should be the subject of my talk.
But I do wonder how people outside Havana view their country and its future.
There's one car for every 26 people in Cuba, so hitchhiking is a common practice, and this gives me a chance to do some more research.
We fight, we struggle, we survive.
As conversation develops, I'm increasingly struck by the delicate line Cubans walk between their pride and their struggle-- between what they can say and not say.
While nearly everyone expresses frustration at Cuba's economic woes, they are divided on how much to blame the U.
S.
embargo and how much their own government.
Woman: The embargo is something that is affecting us.
I mean, we Cubans, we want McDonalds, we want Nike, we want Apple, we want everything that you have.
But I really think that the most important thing is our government to have the wisdom of knowing how much we need to open trade with you, but to alter it with some boundaries so you will not take over everything.
We cannot became Puerto Rico.
- [crash.]
- [tires screech.]
- Oh, God.
- [car door opens.]
[panting.]
¡Hola! ¡Hola! ¡Hola! ¡Hola! ¡Hola! ¡Hola! [heartbeat thunders.]
[guitar.]
First of all, I should say right off that everything turned out fine.
The cyclist survived, and I was cleared of any wrongdoing.
But for a while there, I honestly thought I'd killed a man in a country I was just trying to get to know better.
I even thought I might spend the rest of my life in a Cuban prison.
But none of that happened.
Just three days after the accident, I'm standing backstage at Havana's Teatro Nacional, about to give my talk on U.
S.
-Cuba relations.
I'm very proud to be here at the first TEDxHabana ever.
Honestly, I can barely remember what I said that day.
At one point, I looked down and noticed I still had the cyclist's blood on my shoes.
I wanted to convey the complex picture that Cuban people had shared with me of their country.
The question of the oppression of democratic freedoms.
They had spoken, of course, of their struggle for human rights, but equally had expressed genuine pridein their society.
And I, myself, had an emergency in the past week while I was here in Cuba.
Thankfully, everybody is okay.
The truth is, the medical system had been professional, caring, and effective, but perhaps less expectedly, so were the police.
My interrogation was long but fair.
I was provided a lawyer and translator who were present throughout.
Ultimately, my talk imagined a day when the U.
S.
embargo might be lifted.
Would Cuba be able to reap benefits from the free market without compromising the strengths I had seen in its social system? Suddenly, my talk, which might have otherwise been pretty academic, had gotten a dose of reality.
It was all pretty surreal.
So it's definitely a interesting thing to go back to a place where you've had a really traumatic experience.
Why had I returned? Before releasing me, the police said my victim's injuries were serious but not life threatening.
He was a farmer and so would likely be out of work for some time, but he was alive.
This was comforting.
But over time, one thing gnawed at me.
In the chaos of it all, I had barely seen his face.
Meeting Olberto closed one unanswered question but left me with many more.
In the year that had passed, historic changes had taken place in the relationship betweenthe U.
S.
and Cuba.
Embassies were opened and diplomatic relations restored.
But what did this really mean? So we're going now to the scene of the accident.
I make films to try to better understand things.
As Olberto and I grew more comfortable with one another, I told him I had an idea.
- Okay.
Camera rolling.
- Quiet.
Okay, Olberto.
Action! It might seem crazy to hit a man with your car and then ask him to play himself in a recreation of the accident, but maybe sometimes you need a bit of make believe to get at the truth.
Retracing my steps from the previous year, I was able to dig even deeper into what the future might hold for the U.
S.
and Cuba.
You might wanna be higher and to the side a little more.
As in any old relationship, what quickly emerged was an array of old patterns, new challenges, and perhaps new opportunities.
It is an historic step.
When we talk about normalization of relations between the two countries, it includes all these issues.
On the Cuban side, we need the end of the blockade.
including reimbursement for all the money that we had lost, and we need, of course, the return of Guantanamo.
- What does Cuba have to do? - This is a matter of negotiation.
We think it is possible to have business relations with the United States and still be a country which continues to build socialism.
What I learned, I think, is not to expect a sudden solution to what has been such a complex puzzle to this point.
But watching our U.
S.
film crew connect on a human level with our Cuban counterparts, and seeing the joy we shared as we sought to tell that story, I couldn't help think that if it were up to the people of the two countries, there surely wouldn't be a conflict at all.
[piano.]
[continues.]
[ends.]
[jazz.]
[classical waltz.]
[man chanting.]
- Want some cash? - Okay.
[man counting.]
[speaks native language.]
- No vacation? - No vacation.
[overlapping chatter.]
Okay your car is the best car in the garage.
- Thank you very much.
- You want a printout? [thunder rumbles.]
[bird chirps.]
My work does swing between noise and silence.
The rhythms of the sky and the earth, the songs of birds, the music of the wind-- that's the foundation of my whole life's work.
I am drawn to extremes.
I am not much on middles.
It's either atmospheric, or it's in your face.
After living most of my life on the edge of wild country, if I was gonna leave, it had to be for the opposite extreme.
Makes total sense to me.
The first thing that I imagine when I imagine a new piece is the actual physical space of the piece.
When we're indoors, in a concert hall, we're trying to hermetically seal ourselves off from everything except a few carefully produced sounds that we regard as the music.
And everything else, we regard as an interruption, not the music, an intrusion, noise.
When we go outside, rather than listening to just a few sounds, we listen to as many sounds as we can possibly hear.
[atmospheric.]
SILA is an Inuit word-- the breath of the world.
It's the weather, wind.
But SILA is also awareness.
It's intelligence.
It's our awareness of the world that we inhabit.
It's not a wilderness piece.
It's not a country piece.
It's a piece about our place in the world wherever that may be.
[continues.]
We're outside, and we hear things that we don't see, and that's a very exciting experience to try and figure out.
The more open the music can be, the more possibility there is for someone to discover something in it that I didn't know was there, to bring something of their own into it.
The idea that somehow we are apart from nature, rather than a part of nature.
That's the heart of our dilemma, isn't it? And it could be our eventual undoing as a species.
You know, the famous story of Jackson Pollock, and somebody asked him why he didn't paint from nature, and he snarled at them, "I am nature.
" Well, yeah, absolutely.
[wind blowing.]
[water rushing.]
[wind whistling.]
[yowls.]
[swing.]
Man: As far back as I could remember, I always wanted to be a detective.
For 25 years, I was a special agent with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Not many people could say they helped put a serial killer nurse and doctor behind bars for the rest of their natural lives.
Now I'm a private investigator, and I'm also the President of the Society of Professional Investigators, otherwise known as SPI.
Hi, guys.
Have a seat.
Each month, my SPIs get together at Forlini's which hasn't changed since 1943.
Hi, Emmanuelle.
You know Dr.
Wellner? It's the perfect setting for investigators, where top New York City law enforcement officials can dine alongside it's most notorious defendants.
- Would you like one, sir? - Sure.
Please.
It's like I have two families.
And like most families, we got some interesting characters.
Had a really neat case of a neurologist in Pittsburgh who poisoned his wife.
[laughter.]
Dr.
Michael Wellner, the George Clooney of forensic psychiatry.
We met at a conference on serial killers.
Didn't you tell me once a case about a guy who slept in a coffin? Yes.
He ate raw fish, not sushi, and he slept in a coffin, which was kept in the back of the hearse that he drove around in.
[laughter.]
Charlie Iadanza, straight out of Guys and Dolls, and likewise for the characters he encounters on the streets.
This lapel pin can actually record video and audio.
Does it have a zoom lens like mine? [laughter.]
P.
I.
is a unique set of humanity.
We have a motto.
If they're alive, we serve them.
If they're dead, we'll tell you where they're buried.
We walk, talk, eat, and sleep investigations.
You know, I don't know if any of you have got this feeling that the world is nasty and evil and there's nothing to be done about it.
Barbara Butcher, aptly named, is a death investigator.
Only a real butcher has witnessed the brutality she has.
My Christmas Eve night of horrors? I get called up to the Bronx, pull up to the scene, and I hear a woman screaming and screaming.
They said, "That's Maria.
" I went upstairs, and in this apartment, under the Christmas tree, is a guy wrapped up in duct tape, and on him is a big tag that says, - "You're next, Maria.
" - Ooh.
For SPIs, our hunger for good Italian is only second to our hunger for justice.
People are liberal, they donate to charity, yet they still think it's okay to steal from their landlord.
Bill Golodner, the Popeye Doyle of SPI.
He could get a confession out of a mime.
We had a landlord who believed that the tenant was actually living way down in South Jersey.
We found out that this guy was an enormous baseball fan.
So we did an undercover operation where I posed as a film producer doing a film about baseball.
We spoke to this guy, and he says, "Oh, I go to 30 games a year.
" I said, "That's interesting.
How do you drive all the way back down here?" He says, "Oh, I have an apartment in Manhattan.
" "It's a rent-controlled apartment, and I'm really not supposed to have it.
" This guy was like, it was one slap to make him talk and twenty to make him shut up.
- [laughter.]
- Within two weeks, they were getting their keys back to the apartment.
Man: We came across this one story down in the Meatpacking District.
This is when the Meatpacking lived up to its reputation.
No pun intended.
Paul Babakitis-- This former NYPD sergeant spent a career dominating drug lords, prostitutes, and gamblers.
We sent our undercover in to this location to investigate an allegation of S&M activity and prostitution.
Normally, we give our undercover, like, 10 minutes.
If they don't come out, we're going in.
We're gonna take the door down and raid the place.
Our undercover doesn't come out, because he was hanging by the rafters from one arm to the other, and this woman was whipping his butt.
- [laughter.]
- It was insane.
It's past my bedtime.
I want to thank everybody for coming.
I'll see you all in October.
Have a great night, everybody.
[applause.]
I don't think anyone of us would trade in what we do.
For us to live any other way is nuts.
It's nice to know I get to live the rest of my life like a snoop.
[piano.]
Woman: When I tried to put the last 12 days into a few words, I thought it was impossible.
Then I realized it actually comes down to something so simple.
It's always been you.
They say that a successful marriage requires falling in love many times with the same person, and I can't think of a more perfect way to describe how I feel about you.
I can't imagine life without you.
You're the only person that knows me better than I know myself.
You know my faults, my little quirks, and instead of trying to change me, you love me and want to marry me.
Turns out, dreams do come true.
With this ring, I thee wed.
With this ring, I thee wed.
As a symbol of my love and commitment to you.
As a symbol of my love and commitment to you.
With this ring, I thee wed.
Congratulations, and you may kiss your bride.
[Woman speaks native language on P.
A.
.]
Man: If you really wanna get to know a country, become a perp in it.
November 2014, I'm invited to Havana, Cuba, to take part in the first TED Talk in the country's history.
My topic is a sensitive one-- U.
S.
-Cuba relations-- so I feel a special pressure to get things right.
Like any city, Havana presents a certain image to visitors, but I wanna get past all that, so I get off the beaten path to talk directly to Cubans about their country, America, and everything in between.
I wanna improve my Spanish.
As an American in Cuba, you quickly realize how little you actually know of this country you've heard so much about.
Teachers, artists, doctors-- I talked to people across the spectrum.
One thing I learn is, in a country where the average person makes 30 bucks a month, everybody's gotta hustle to survive.
After decades of political and economic isolation, Havana's one-time grandeur seems weary and rundown, but not its people.
For them, survival has become a way of life.
They call it "La Lucha"-- or the fight.
Culturally, Cuba is alive, thriving and transforming.
Despite ongoing human rights concerns, the overriding sense you get from people is of a nation in transition.
In nearly every conversation I have, Cuba's relationship with America naturally arises.
But what's striking is that, for Cubans, the last 60 years have been just one chapter in a long saga of adversity and reinvention.
With my talk a few days off, I decide to get out of the city and venture into the countryside.
There are growing rumors of a possible thaw in U.
S.
-Cuba relations, and I'm starting to think this should be the subject of my talk.
But I do wonder how people outside Havana view their country and its future.
There's one car for every 26 people in Cuba, so hitchhiking is a common practice, and this gives me a chance to do some more research.
We fight, we struggle, we survive.
As conversation develops, I'm increasingly struck by the delicate line Cubans walk between their pride and their struggle-- between what they can say and not say.
While nearly everyone expresses frustration at Cuba's economic woes, they are divided on how much to blame the U.
S.
embargo and how much their own government.
Woman: The embargo is something that is affecting us.
I mean, we Cubans, we want McDonalds, we want Nike, we want Apple, we want everything that you have.
But I really think that the most important thing is our government to have the wisdom of knowing how much we need to open trade with you, but to alter it with some boundaries so you will not take over everything.
We cannot became Puerto Rico.
- [crash.]
- [tires screech.]
- Oh, God.
- [car door opens.]
[panting.]
¡Hola! ¡Hola! ¡Hola! ¡Hola! ¡Hola! ¡Hola! [heartbeat thunders.]
[guitar.]
First of all, I should say right off that everything turned out fine.
The cyclist survived, and I was cleared of any wrongdoing.
But for a while there, I honestly thought I'd killed a man in a country I was just trying to get to know better.
I even thought I might spend the rest of my life in a Cuban prison.
But none of that happened.
Just three days after the accident, I'm standing backstage at Havana's Teatro Nacional, about to give my talk on U.
S.
-Cuba relations.
I'm very proud to be here at the first TEDxHabana ever.
Honestly, I can barely remember what I said that day.
At one point, I looked down and noticed I still had the cyclist's blood on my shoes.
I wanted to convey the complex picture that Cuban people had shared with me of their country.
The question of the oppression of democratic freedoms.
They had spoken, of course, of their struggle for human rights, but equally had expressed genuine pridein their society.
And I, myself, had an emergency in the past week while I was here in Cuba.
Thankfully, everybody is okay.
The truth is, the medical system had been professional, caring, and effective, but perhaps less expectedly, so were the police.
My interrogation was long but fair.
I was provided a lawyer and translator who were present throughout.
Ultimately, my talk imagined a day when the U.
S.
embargo might be lifted.
Would Cuba be able to reap benefits from the free market without compromising the strengths I had seen in its social system? Suddenly, my talk, which might have otherwise been pretty academic, had gotten a dose of reality.
It was all pretty surreal.
So it's definitely a interesting thing to go back to a place where you've had a really traumatic experience.
Why had I returned? Before releasing me, the police said my victim's injuries were serious but not life threatening.
He was a farmer and so would likely be out of work for some time, but he was alive.
This was comforting.
But over time, one thing gnawed at me.
In the chaos of it all, I had barely seen his face.
Meeting Olberto closed one unanswered question but left me with many more.
In the year that had passed, historic changes had taken place in the relationship betweenthe U.
S.
and Cuba.
Embassies were opened and diplomatic relations restored.
But what did this really mean? So we're going now to the scene of the accident.
I make films to try to better understand things.
As Olberto and I grew more comfortable with one another, I told him I had an idea.
- Okay.
Camera rolling.
- Quiet.
Okay, Olberto.
Action! It might seem crazy to hit a man with your car and then ask him to play himself in a recreation of the accident, but maybe sometimes you need a bit of make believe to get at the truth.
Retracing my steps from the previous year, I was able to dig even deeper into what the future might hold for the U.
S.
and Cuba.
You might wanna be higher and to the side a little more.
As in any old relationship, what quickly emerged was an array of old patterns, new challenges, and perhaps new opportunities.
It is an historic step.
When we talk about normalization of relations between the two countries, it includes all these issues.
On the Cuban side, we need the end of the blockade.
including reimbursement for all the money that we had lost, and we need, of course, the return of Guantanamo.
- What does Cuba have to do? - This is a matter of negotiation.
We think it is possible to have business relations with the United States and still be a country which continues to build socialism.
What I learned, I think, is not to expect a sudden solution to what has been such a complex puzzle to this point.
But watching our U.
S.
film crew connect on a human level with our Cuban counterparts, and seeing the joy we shared as we sought to tell that story, I couldn't help think that if it were up to the people of the two countries, there surely wouldn't be a conflict at all.
[piano.]
[continues.]
[ends.]
[jazz.]
[classical waltz.]
[man chanting.]
- Want some cash? - Okay.
[man counting.]
[speaks native language.]
- No vacation? - No vacation.
[overlapping chatter.]
Okay your car is the best car in the garage.
- Thank you very much.
- You want a printout? [thunder rumbles.]
[bird chirps.]
My work does swing between noise and silence.
The rhythms of the sky and the earth, the songs of birds, the music of the wind-- that's the foundation of my whole life's work.
I am drawn to extremes.
I am not much on middles.
It's either atmospheric, or it's in your face.
After living most of my life on the edge of wild country, if I was gonna leave, it had to be for the opposite extreme.
Makes total sense to me.
The first thing that I imagine when I imagine a new piece is the actual physical space of the piece.
When we're indoors, in a concert hall, we're trying to hermetically seal ourselves off from everything except a few carefully produced sounds that we regard as the music.
And everything else, we regard as an interruption, not the music, an intrusion, noise.
When we go outside, rather than listening to just a few sounds, we listen to as many sounds as we can possibly hear.
[atmospheric.]
SILA is an Inuit word-- the breath of the world.
It's the weather, wind.
But SILA is also awareness.
It's intelligence.
It's our awareness of the world that we inhabit.
It's not a wilderness piece.
It's not a country piece.
It's a piece about our place in the world wherever that may be.
[continues.]
We're outside, and we hear things that we don't see, and that's a very exciting experience to try and figure out.
The more open the music can be, the more possibility there is for someone to discover something in it that I didn't know was there, to bring something of their own into it.
The idea that somehow we are apart from nature, rather than a part of nature.
That's the heart of our dilemma, isn't it? And it could be our eventual undoing as a species.
You know, the famous story of Jackson Pollock, and somebody asked him why he didn't paint from nature, and he snarled at them, "I am nature.
" Well, yeah, absolutely.
[wind blowing.]
[water rushing.]
[wind whistling.]