Geoffrey Gray

Focus Queens

Gloria Lipschitz* was probing for creativity, and her questions kept getting harder. "Please name five uses for a single brick, other than using it to build anything," she said, with a raspy, tar-inflected voice. Bricks? I tried to think. Nothing. Shit.

A few months ago I applied for the best job in town: focus group participant. I was to be paid handsomely for delivering my opinions, sipping various spirits and cognacs, judging Madison Avenue ad campaigns, and offering my "emotional" and "spiritual" connections to workaday products like iced tea or dog food.

If played right, I heard from friends, the job could dish $600 a week or more in cash -- and I could still wake up at noon!

But what can you do with only one brick?

Gloria is an independent recruiter for several marketing companies. She's the chain-smoking lady on the phone in her apartment all day, talking to schmucks like me, telemarketing for proclivities. Her job is to file people into a database and then arrange those characteristics into a team that tests products and ideas.

She hates her job. She gets sweaty ears, a sore neck too. The one redeeming quality, she says, is that once in a while, she'll talk to an applicant who might make her laugh.

That's not me. "Keep trying, honey. You might get lucky."

Her position, however, is über-risky. In fact, it's downright dangerous.

The million-dollar marketing companies who run focus groups want ideal participants: people who've never been to a focus group and know nothing about the process.

That makes life tough for Gloria. Why call 100 people to find the right candidate for Lipton Ice Tea, when she can send the same guy to Tazo, Arizona, and Snapple in one week!

She was looking for that guy. It wasn't me.

She asked me how much money I made, and when I told her, she chuckled.

"Honey," she said. "Listen to me. You make $40,000 a year. You're engaged. You drink alcohol four times a week, twice on weekends, exercise in a gym, and you like to shop, shop, shop. . . that's what I need now, OK?"

OK!

Every night in New York, 20 to 40 focus groups are held in big, empty buildings with big, empty boardrooms, experts say. Normally, there are eight to 12 people in a group. The hostesses tend to be perky, blonde types: think sorority girl turned market "analyst." Like jail or a spooky psych experiment, the sessions are always being watched by fat cats behind a two-way mirror, and sometimes being videotaped. Pay is typically from $50 to $100 per session, though it depends on the focus.

Companies that organize this research and -- hint, hint -- have recruiting services can be found at Bluebook.org. The best way to market yourself to marketing companies would be -- and you didn't hear it from me -- to call and ask for the recruitment department. Sound naive. They will plop you into a database if they so choose. If not, on to the next company.

Be forewarned: Marketing groups all say the idea of "adaptive" people like you and me applying for focus groups and fudging our personas to make quick cash fucks up the sample and threatens the "integrity" of the industry. They loathe so-called "focus queens" -- those who've been known to invent different personalities to maximize their own market potential.

"Making money this way is just myth," says one director who didn't want to be named. "We don't want people that want money. It makes it harder for us to do things accurately."

Still -- like many unfortunate things in life -- it is done. And if you can take the dough for telling Bacardi their rum ads stink, there's no reason why someone else should.

"The job takes no effort," says a friend who gets called about once a month. "You shoot the shit, maybe meet a cute girl, then get cash. Sometimes you have to lie, but hey, that's all in the game."

A hint: You don't have to lie. The truth is always easiest to remember. And besides, many companies are looking to interview college students. They say that transient group is the most difficult in which to find good respondents for beer, jeans and "cool" ad campaigns. So you may be perfect just the way you are: hungry and horny and broke.

Another hint: Don't tell the recruiter you're a newspaper reporter.

"What do you do for work?" she asked.

"I'm sort of a ... writer."

"What kind of writer?"

"Not a very good one."

"Do you work for a newspaper or magazine or any printed publication?"

I ran fast from all specifics.

"That's a very tough field to get into," I said.

Then she popped the Brick Question. Five uses for a brick other than for building purposes.

"A piece of art?"

She sighed. "Oh, that's new."

"In a garden, garden art," I said.

"Four more."

I stumbled. I mumbled the word "collage." I tried to stall. I asked to call her back, and she told me not to bother. I bombed.

"Sorry, honey," she said. "We're looking for people who can articulate themselves."

Maybe you can do better.

*Note: Gloria Lipshitz is a pseudonym.

Geoffrey Gray is a contributor to the Village Voice.

Plastic and the Pentagon

The numbers were staggering: $3,400 for a sumo-wrestling outfit, $16,000 for a corporate golf membership, $38,000 in cash advances for lap dances. All were part of a $101 million shopping spree made with "government purchase cards," the U.S. military's version of corporate credit cards -- another made-for-media scandal of reckless Defense Department spending.

But throughout congressional hearings on the topic in July, the real scandal with the military's other piece of plastic, the Government Travel Card (GTC), went ignored by the mainstream press, despite the fact that the card has plunged thousands of ordinary servicemen and servicewomen into debt so deep that the Pentagon is busy attaching the wages of its own soldiers. And the only military commander known to raise hell about the scheme -- a lone Air Force colonel based in the Midwest -- says that blowing the whistle on the GTC ruined her career.

Lower in the ranks, the damage has been considerable. U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan -- ordered not to leave home without their GTCs -- have found themselves stranded in the desert without a dime because their credit was suddenly cut off, according to a May 29 report in the Military Times, leaving families behind in a nasty catch-22: Swallow the debt, or borrow more money to pay the bills so their credit wouldn't be ruined.

Concocted by Congress in 1998, the GTC was designed to privatize the accounting of federal travel expenses and touted to save taxpayer money. (It also reaps huge fees by the financial conglomerates that issue the cards.) It works like this: Servicepeople are ordered to apply for personal GTCs -- interest-free credit cards issued exclusively by the Bank of America. Instead of requesting vouchers or getting cash to pay for travel expenses, servicepeople pay up front with the their own GTC cards -- essentially floating interest-free loans to the government. As a result, they have to submit expense reports and wait for reimbursements.

But reimbursements often come late, according to a recent report issued by the General Accounting Office, which means the GTC bills aren't always paid on time and servicepeople are getting branded as "delinquents." The GAO found "substantial" delays in reimbursements; in one command unit, for example, the California National Guard failed to pay its personnel within a month 61 percent of the time, and of those payments, 42 percent were inaccurate.

Just in the past year, the names of more than 10,000 military personnel have been reported to national credit bureaus as "credit risks," according to the Military Times. Instead of changing the mechanics of the travel card system, however, the DOD and the bank have only tightened their grip on cardholders; since October, the Pentagon has garnisheed over $19.5 million from military paychecks to pay off "delinquent" GTC bills, according to DOD accountants.

"It's totally unbelievable," says Ed Mierzwinski, consumer banking advocate at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "The notion that you're forced into a contract--one where you can't pay your bills on time--and the Pentagon takes it out of your paycheck is outrageous." Military personnel have even less cushion than civilians: Annual pay for an E-2 private is between $11,000 and $14,000.

"It's a pathetic situation when soldiers are forced to buy into a system that's likely to screw them personally," says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a D.C. group. "This is just another example where the Pentagon has conjured up a scam with a favorite contractor. The desperate rush to privatization has a million warts."

By putting the burden of bookkeeping on its servicepeople and the bank, the Bank of America claims that the Pentagon has saved anywhere from $100 million to $450 million a year in administrative costs. Meanwhile, Bank of America has acquired an entire new fleet of captive consumers: more than 1.4 million servicemen and servicewomen ordered by law to use the card for every travel expense till 2008.

Pentagon officials contend that the program is beneficial to both taxpayers and servicemen. Consumer advocates laugh.

"In no way can this be characterized as a pro-employee program," says Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America. "For any government agency to insist that its employees obtain a personal credit card only shifts the cost and risk on its employees. It's highly inappropriate."

More unsettling, the GTC program may turn out to be highly illegal. All employees of the executive branch are required to apply for them; all servicepeople are ordered to do it. But using a military order to force a serviceman or servicewoman into a private contract--against his or her will--is a clear violation of basic contract law, according to handful of military and constitutional legal scholars.

Moreover, they argue, forcing military personnel to personally front the government money for travel expenses and subject their personal "creditworthiness" to the whims of the Pentagon's sluggish accounting system could potentially violate private property rights, which are protected--even for servicepeople--under the Fifth Amendment.

"There are serious legal and moral concerns with a government agency ordering a member of the military to sign a private contract," says Philip Cave, a class-action lawyer who specializes in military law. "In the big scheme of things, this policy may seem like small potatoes--until you're the individual involved."

Top Pentagon officials are grinding out publicity about their get-tough probes of credit-card abuse, but their investigations apparently have nothing to do with the cards' shattering effects on the piggy banks of their military personnel.

In late June, for instance, DOD Comptroller Dov Zakheim scheduled a Pentagon press conference to announce the findings of a special task force ordered by Donald Rumsfeld to investigate the military's credit card programs. Zakheim did mention servicepeople's "abuse" of the card; legal and consumer concerns were not raised.

Vince Crawley, a reporter for the Military Times, raised those issues with Zakheim, and the comptroller, who's the Pentagon's chief financial officer, seemed caught off guard.

"You're effectively forcing people to get into a third-party contract with Bank of America," Crawley told Zakheim, according to a transcript of the press conference, "and they're personally responsible for getting the card paid. Has anybody looked at the legality of that?"

"Oh, sure," Zakheim replied. "Look, a person can always refuse to take a card. You know, nobody's forcing you to take the card."

"But there's a mandatory use requirement," Crawley said, "It's the law."

"Well," Zakheim said, pausing to lean away from the microphone and toward an aide. "Yes. It's true. It's the law. So, yes, the law is telling you to do it, but . . . correct me if I'm wrong, have people been violently against the use of credit cards, or rather, charge cards? We haven't heard any protest against it."



Colonel Judith Varnau protested the travel card even before the day her application came in the mail in March 2000 at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita. She signed the form, but scribbled in the margins: "I have signed this under duress. I have not voluntarily, for fear of losing my job."

The bank activated her card, so she wrote back, "Again, I state that I am not, nor have I been willing to enter into this private contract. . . . I am only following orders to obtain the card out of fear of losing my job, adversely affecting my career, or resulting in conviction and possible imprisonment."

Ten days later, her card was canceled. A week after that, she was in the office of her wing commander, Colonel Frederick Roggero. Under air force policy, if a card is canceled, personnel are expected to pay expenses in cash or from other credit cards. Roggero, instead, gave Varnau an ultimatum.

"It's either leaving or staying," a voice identified by Varnau as Roggero said on an audiotape Varnau secretly recorded during many closed-door meetings.

She decided to stay, and to fight the card. She wrote state representatives and senators in protest. She asked the Pentagon for whistle-blower protection. She filed five criminal charges against Roggero, with specifications--extortion, extortion with threats, conspiracy, solicitation, and false official statements, all serious criminal offenses with maximum jail time of three years. She kept the unreleased tapes as the final trump card, if her day in military court should come.

That day might never come. After two years of fighting the policy, Varnau's charges against Roggero were dropped for lack of evidence, according to the air force press office. But no proper investigation was ever made, Varnau contends, and the air force lost her file three times in one year. Once a colonel running a small clinic, the 55-year-old Varnau now pushes papers in a dead-end job that she says was created just for her. "I'm blackballed," Varnau tells the Voice. "I'm the black sheep. My career is over. I've got no place to go."

Roggero, on the other hand, was recently promoted to brigadier general. He now works at the Pentagon as director of marketing for the the air force.

The Secret War on FBI Whistle-blowers

Coleen Rowley didn't want to talk. She hadn't answered the phone in weeks. Picking it up this time was a fluke. "I'm just trying to focus on my work," the FBI's outspoken special agent said two days before testifying for the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I'm just trying to get back to the way it was."

That's a long way from where she is now, a long way from the nights in May when she typed that 13-page memo to the chief at headquarters and transformed herself, virtually overnight, into a sort of counterterrorism superhero -- "Cassandra" Rowley, a 20-year FBI veteran who blasted her bosses as "careerists" and claimed the agency "circled the wagons" to cover up a score of pre-9-11 intelligence blunders.

"It wasn't my intention to get the media involved," Rowley says. "Gosh, now it's a little like . . . whoa! . . . It's pretty way out there."

Was she worried about retaliation? Losing her job? Public smears?

She had to leave for Washington. She didn't want to say.

Enter the patriotic tattletale, star of America's most thrilling political drama. The stakes could not be higher, nor the characters and overwrought plot more ripe for prime time. It's Must-See Reality TV.

But a story like Rowley's often ends years later with a subtle game of bureaucratic payback, a bitter finale the public rarely gets to witness.

Rowley has been promised protection. Some think her mass exposure will provide her with a shield of immunity. So far, the Minneapolis field office reports that no investigations into her situation exist, and at the word of FBI director Robert Mueller, there will be none in the future.

Public promises, counter a chorus of former whistle-blowers, only last so long. "It's great TV for now," says Notra Trulock, former director of intelligence for the Department of Energy, "but she has no idea what's she's gotten herself into."

The first stop on the whistle-blower's roller coaster to ruin is discreditation. That's what happened to Trulock, who was accused of racial bias when he blew the whistle on the bungled investigation into Wen Ho Lee, a scientist accused of spying for China.

"Anonymous news leaks always come first," he says. Fellow agents may peek into Rowley's personnel file, quiz her colleagues about her habits, and find something to feed the press, and already rumors are being whispered on the Hill. The gossip: Rowley once punished a whistle-blower herself.

Next, say those who've taken the ride, comes a gamut of retaliatory tactics: harassment from supervisors, the loss of office allies, a stripping of security clearance, the monitoring of activities, inter-office relocation -- one Department of Agriculture informer was moved to a desk in the hallway outside the bathroom -- demotions, psychiatric or medical referrals, or "administrative leave," to put it euphemistically.

"The FBI never fires whistle-blowers, directly," says psychiatric social worker Don Soeken.

In the late '70s, Soeken worked for the U.S. Public Health Service, and his job was to perform "fitness for duty" examinations for federal employees whose supervisors thought they were mentally unstable. But Soeken noticed something curious about his clientele. All his patients seemed to be whistle-blowers, Soeken says, and he was asked to label the muckrakers mentally unfit, giving the government the green light to dismiss them. Soeken refused. He became a whistle-blower himself, reporting the shameful practice to Congress, and now helps whistle-blowers recover on a farm in West Virginia that he calls the Whistlestop.

"There's only one commandment in the FBI," says one of his patients, Fred Whitehurst. "Thou shall not say anything bad about the FBI." Whitehurst used to be the FBI's chief forensic scientist for explosives analysis; he examined the powders left on the rubble from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. For over a decade, he watched other lab scientists fudging reports to make quick criminal convictions. He howled. Now he lives in the backwoods of North Carolina and runs a forensic watchdog group.

Like Rowley, Whitehurst was praised in Congress for his courage. Senators promised him an award ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. What he got instead were demotions, a missing medical record, internal investigations, followed by psychological treatments. "The FBI will push you 'til you break," he says, "and you can never return from your day in the sun."

Like many other agents, he was flown to the Isaac Ray Center in Chicago to undergo a fitness-for-duty evaluation. For 27 years, Isaac Ray has enjoyed a contract to treat FBI personnel, and in addition to working on criminals and delinquents, they've also shrunk the heads of celebrity madmen like John F. Hinckley Jr.

"Vulgar rape" is how Whitehurst describes his experience there. "I was sentenced to a room for nine hours and wasn't even allowed to pee."

Isaac Ray denies the allegations. Evaluations -- which can last over several days and cost more than $10,000 -- are based on a comprehensive test featuring 565 yes-or-no questions, according to the center, and that test has not changed in 30 years. "People [like Whitehurst] who are 'normal' are going to have trouble if you give them enough stress over a long period of time," says center president Dr. James Cavanaugh. "But I can assure you nobody is being submitted to vulgarities or unusual procedures."

Whitehurst says he had no choice but to undergo the treatment, because if he refused, the bureau would fire him for insubordination.

"The strange thing is, Americans pray for patriotic individuals to save them from national disasters," Whitehurst says. "But when that someone comes along, they slice into your abdomen, pull 30 feet of gut out, stomp on it, and then what kind of hero are you? You're not. You've been branded as a loon. All you have to do in the FBI is step in the line of fire. You'll get blown away."

The same day Rowley left for Washington, a colleague of hers, Special Agent Robert Wright, was waiting a few hundred miles away in the FBI's Chicago field office. Wright was getting nervous. The producers from CNN's Crossfire had been calling; they wanted him to appear on their Thursday night show, with Carville and Novak, to coincide with the presumed lead story, Rowley's testimony. At the advice of his counsel, Wright agreed.

Wright's a whistle-blower, too -- sort of. He's a money guy, tracks the accounts of international terrorists, and like Rowley, he claims his investigation, code-named Vulgar Betrayal, was obstructed by the bureau. Like Rowley, he also has suggested 9-11 could have been prevented. But unlike her, he can't seem to find anyone in Washington who'll listen.

Bob Novak started the questioning: "Mr. Wright, your charges against the FBI are really more disturbing, more serious, than Ms. Rowley's. Why is it, do you think, that you have been ignored by the media, ignored by the congressional committees, and no attention has been paid to your allegations?"

Wright paused. "I don't know the true reasons for that."

Part of the problem started with him. He asked the FBI for permission to go public with his 500-page manuscript, which he says outlines the failures of the FBI's counterterrorism efforts. Muzzled by the Office of Public and Congressional Affairs, he sought help last summer from Judicial Watch, a Washington nonprofit famous for suing government to get documents and expose corruption. Judicial Watch is now suing the FBI for him. And his life is slowly going to hell.

Once on al-Qaeda's trail, Wright now works run-of-the-mill bank fraud cases. He's also been hit with two claims of harassment -- one sexual, one racial -- both deemed baseless by his lawyers. No one, it would seem, takes him seriously -- except Judicial Watch, which calls him another victim of the bureau's "culture of fear."

Hours before Coleen Rowley walked into the chambers of the Senate Judiciary Committee, her boss had promised the nation he would protect her. But nothing in the law requires him to. Federal whistle-blower statutes don't apply to FBI agents. Rather than being reviewed by a third party, their complaints are handled internally.

Shielded by nothing but her trust and the goodwill of her boss, Rowley sat alone before a hundred flashbulbs and told the world the FBI needs to change, quickly. She was polite, thorough, boring.

During the recess, the network pundits seemed disappointed with the performance. Sure, Rowley had fleshed out the details of her letter, they argued, but she wasn't naming names. She showed no outrage. She wasn't acting like a whistle-blower. She even commended Bob Mueller! She was positive about change! Hardly a renegade tone.

"Maybe the 'treatment' will be different for Rowley," says Soeken, "but I doubt it."

Geoffrey Gray is a writer living in New York City. His work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, the Village Voice and City Limits. He can be reached at geoffreymgray@yahoo.com.

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Focus Queens

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