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March 21, 2009

Weekend FT: Elemental Architecture

March 21, 2009

By Julie Earle-Levine

Architectural designer Todd Shultz searched for more than a year to find the perfect wood for his client’s basement wine room. The heart pine he found in a cotton mill in Eatonville, Georgia had a golden colour, tight growth rings and blue veins – signs of its authenticity and age.

But when the client saw the beams, he was horrified. “He was like: ‘What are these dark black marks? Can you get rid of that?’,” Shultz recalls.

It was only after the man heard about the wood’s history – the marks were caused by a rare mould that had formed in the tree more than 200 years before – that he became enamoured with it.

The story is a familiar one to Richard McFarland, who co-founded California-based TerraMai, a reclaimed woods company, in the 1990s. Homeowners appreciate the aesthetics and eco-friendly credentials of his products, he says, but mainly “it is the story behind it that they fall in love with”.

Finding the wood, processing it, then building from it can take years. Once a source is located, the beams are photographed and their history researched. Every piece is sorted, cleaned, graded and then de-metalled and possibly re-milled. “The first reaction of someone is: ‘There is a lot of damage to this stuff’. But once it is re-milled and the spike holes are plugged, the overall effect is stunning,” McFarland says.

He says about half of TerraMai’s projects are residential, including houses in Florida, New York’s Hudson Valley, Nevada’s Lake Tahoe and Aspen, Colorado. The wood is not cheap; flooring made from 100-year-old exotics sourced from as far afield as India, South America and south-east Asia cost about $15-$25 per sq ft, about 30 per cent more than floors made from new or “virgin” wood.

But McFarland insists that “people will pay for quality”. “Because it is reclaimed, old-growth tropical hardwood – among the hardest wood on the planet – will last much longer,” he says. “With proper care, these floors can last generations”, compared with about 20 years for just-cut alternatives.

Plus, the reduced environmental impact cannot be ignored. “With every foot of reclaimed wood, you are offsetting destruction of a forest.” Yes, there is a carbon footprint in securing the beams, he acknowledges, but specialists say it is insignificant compared with cutting down new trees.

Shultz grew up on a farm, where he was taught to recycle everything. “You didn’t tear down a barn because it was 100 years old, you painted it and fixed it,” he says. “Nothing makes me sicker than seeing a dumpster full of wood. I’m the one pulling up my truck and grabbing the stuff.”

Any surplus wood goes back to his studio to be repurposed for other projects, he adds. “It is not really for cost. It’s for karma.”

Jim Ruig is another reclaimed wood specialist whose business, Australian Salvage, harvests wood from old wharves, French oak wine barrels, old buildings and industrial factories. His first purchase was 10,000 tonnes of wharf timbers, which took 400 semi-trailers to deliver to industrial land he had bought on Brisbane’s outskirts.

But since then demand has been strong. He recently sold A$3.5m (£1.6m) of reclaimed wood to actor Hugh Jackman for his health resort on Queensland’s Gold Coast and outfitted singer Jack Johnson’s seaside home in Byron Bay. He also works with developers eager to add complexity to their building interiors, as well as exporting to the US. Clients choose from a “menu” of recycled timbers, including native blackbutt, spotted gum and ironbark, then decide the finish – raw, lime washed, oil, smoked or antique.

Given the popularity of reclaimed wood – more than 40m board feet is sold a year in the US, five times the amount sold a decade ago – some are concerned about supply. But McFarland is not one of them. “Yes, it is a limited resource but the timber will be recycled again,” he says. “There will be new stories to tell – so many lives from one tree.”


ends

March 15, 2009

Sunday Times of London: Bernie Madoff

Sunday, March 15 2009

By Julie Earle-Levine

By the time Bernard Madoff arrived at court last Thursday, two hours before his 10am hearing, an angry mob had gathered outside the Manhattan courthouse. The $64.8 billion fraudster wore a charcoal-grey suit but no wedding ring or one of his usual vintage watches. A first sign, perhaps, that he knew this was the end.

Three months after this fallen pillar of Wall Street’s scams were exposed, Madoff is now in jail awaiting sentencing. His crimes made headlines around the world and battered the fortunes of the rich and famous, including Steven Spielberg and Nobel Peace Prize winner and holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, as well as wiping out smaller savers and charities.

After last week’s dramatic court appearance, though, many questions remain unanswered. Could Madoff, as he claims, have orchestrated this giant scam alone? How much did his family know? And where is the money?

Prosecutors are no clearer about what role, if any, Madoff’s wife, Ruth, brother Peter, sons Mark and Andrew and his employees played in perhaps the largest Ponzi scheme in history. His family members have denied any involvement. In court Madoff gave no clues. Because he pleaded guilty without making a deal, he is under no obligation to co-operate. There is no guarantee he ever will.

Jim Cox, law professor at Duke University, said Madoff had refused to plead guilty to charges of conspiracy, which would have implicated others. “He has clammed up. It looks like he’s going to take the real story to his grave,” said Cox.

One lawyer there to observe the historic moment, Robert Mintz, white-collar crime expert at McCarter & English, said: “There was a palpable sense of frustration among defrauded investors.”

Inside the packed court, Madoff, flanked by his attorney, Ira Sorkin, and four FBI agents stood stony-faced as the judge reviewed all 11 counts, including security fraud, investment fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, international money laundering, perjury, making false statements, and theft from employer benefits.

The judge asked Madoff if he understood the possible sentence he faced — 150 years’ imprisonment. “I do,” said Madoff. “Do you understand you may lose the right to vote, the right to hold public office,” asked the judge to sniggers from the courtroom.

Once the formalities were over with, Madoff was given his chance to explain what had happened. It was the moment his victims and investigators had been waiting for. He held out his notes and read a 12-minute address.

“I am actually grateful for this first opportunity to publicly speak about my crimes, for which I am deeply sorry and ashamed. As I engaged in fraud, I knew what I was doing was wrong, indeed criminal,” he said. “When I began the Ponzi scheme I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme.

“However, this proved difficult, and ultimately impossible, and as the years went by, I realised that my arrest and this day would inevitably come.”

Madoff said he was in court to “accept responsibility” and explain what happened. But he gave little new information and may never publicly answer for his crime again.

The scam began in the early 1990s when Madoff was finding it hard to make the returns his clients wanted. He felt “compelled to satisfy my clients’ expectations, at any cost”.

Clients were told Madoff had a secret “split strike conversion strategy”. They were told he would invest their money — instead those funds were deposited in a bank account at Chase Manhattan Bank.

When clients asked for their cash, Madoff took the money out of Chase, using cash that belonged to them, or to other clients, he confessed.

Madoff was at pains to claim that his investment advisory business, “the vehicle of my wrongdoing”, was the only part of Madoff Securities engaged in criminal activity. His brother and two sons ran the other branches of his business, proprietary trading and market making, and these were “legitimate, profitable and successful in all respects”, said Madoff.

Even concealing his fraud sounded simple. Madoff confessed he lied to the authorities on numerous occasions and cooked his own books. In recent years, Madoff said, he wired money between New York and his London office “to make it appear as though there were actual securities transactions executed on my behalf”.

He said the London office knew nothing of his crimes and was “a legitimately, honestly run and operated business”.

Mintz said prosecutors would be frustrated by Madoff’s testimony. He said it was a “road map” for the defence as investigations continue. “His strategy is to shield as many assets for his family as he can. He has fallen on his sword.”

While Madoff claims he co-ordinated this vast conspiracy alone, prosecutors seem less convinced. More prosecutions are likely, though they may be months away. “A lot of resources and effort are being expended, both to find assets and to find anyone else who may be responsible for this fraud,” prosecutor Marc Litt said in court.

“It seems to me that it would be difficult for one individual to pull this off. Especially on such a grand scale,” said Mintz.

Cox added: “You have got to think others were at least suspicious. It’s not just who was involved but where all this money went. Is there cash hidden in some Swiss bank account? My guess is we are not going to find much in the way of assets, but so far nothing has really been resolved.”

At the courthouse investors were seething. There was no sense of relief among the victims, many of whom call themselves survivors, a weighty word for this elderly, largely Jewish crowd.

One, Barbara Dweck, 58, had red paint on her hands and carried a billboard with newspaper headlines about the scam. “I wanted to express my feelings about this guy,” she said. “He has blood on his hands. He is equivalent to a murderer. He has destroyed lives. People are sick from this, people are committing suicide.”

The Madoff effect was even felt in the more serene surroundings of leafy north London. One couple, who asked to remain anonymous, tried to take their mind off Madoff by doing some gardening. When asked whether justice had been served at the previous day’s hearing, they just laughed. At best they hope to retrieve a fraction of their investment. Their retirement has been destroyed.

Ilene Kent, a paralegal who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, said: “Justice has been served, but I can’t retire.” She said her family had lost their life savings. She is also a spokeswoman for the online Bernard Madoff Survivors Group, which has 350 members. She wants the government to investigate if others were involved. She said: “It was too complicated and the money too large for just one man.”

ends

March 3, 2009

Best of New York magazine: Reading Dogs

New York Magazine: Best of New York
March 3 , 2009

Best Reading Program

R.E.A.D. With Mudge

Story time’s fun and all, but it’s not nearly as mind-blowing as New York Public Library’s R.E.A.D. With Mudge program, which pairs kids ages 5 and up with trained dogs at six library branches in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. That’s right: They get to read with a dog. The program (named after a popular book series about a boy and his dog, Mudge) helps kids focus on reading by taking a little pressure off them. At the Mulberry Street library branch, a calm Border Collie-Greyhound mix named Theo curls up on kids’ laps for one-on-one reading sessions that last twenty minutes. When a kid forgets to read out loud, the dog nudges him gently. When the child struggles with a word, Theo puts his paw on the page. It’s almost uncanny, says owner Kimberly Wang: “Sometimes I think Theo really can read.


nypl.org or 212-275-6975

Julie Earle-Levine