Byline: By armand limnande section: Section mm; Column 0; T: Men's Fashion Magazine; Pg. 76 Length
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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: DISMISSALS (89%); TELEVISION INDUSTRY (78%); INTERNET VIDEO (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (77%); MARKET SEGMENTATION (77%); INTERNET & WWW (76%); INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING (76%); LANDSCAPING SERVICES (72%); INTERVIEWS (71%); CONSULTING SERVICES (68%); MARKETING & ADVERTISING (50%); RESUMES & CURRICULA VITAE (89%) COMPANY: NEWS CORP (94%); FOOD NETWORK (50%) TICKER: NWS (NYSE) (94%); NCRA (LSE) (94%); NWS (ASX) (94%); NWS (NASDAQ) (94%) PERSON: KEITH RUPERT MURDOCH (73%); BARRY DILLER (53%); DICK CHENEY (52%) GEOGRAPHIC: LOS ANGELES, CA, USA (76%) CALIFORNIA, USA (78%) UNITED STATES (91%) LOAD-DATE: January 30, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: PHOTO: ''I'm a video freak and I love turning over rocks and finding stuff,'' said Stephen Chao, whose new site is a trove of how-to videos. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ANN JOHANSSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1126 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Oh, Yugoslavia! How They Long for Your Firm Embrace BYLINE: By DAN BILEFSKY SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; LJUBLJANA JOURNAL; Pg. 4 LENGTH: 1061 words DATELINE: LJUBLJANA, Slovenia This spring, Bostjan Troha and 50 of his friends from across the former Yugoslavia plan to celebrate the official 116th birthday of the former dictator Josip Broz Tito with a pilgrimage in boxy Yugoslav-era Fico cars to Tito's Croatian birthplace and his marble tomb in Belgrade. To mark the occasion, Mr. Troha has hired a Tito impersonator and dozens of child actors, who will wear Yugoslav partisan berets, wave Yugoslav flags and applaud enthusiastically after the impersonator's address. The revelers will down shots of Slivovitz, the Serbian national drink, and dance to the lurching melodies of Yugoslav folk music along the 360-mile route. His group of pilgrims will be modest compared with the 20,000 from the former Yugoslavia's six republics -- Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia and the Republic of Macedonia -- who traveled daily to the tomb during Communist times after Tito's death in 1980. But sociologists here say it reflects a trend across the Balkans they call Yugonostalgia, in which young and old yearn for the past -- even an authoritarian one -- as they struggle with a legacy of wars, economic hardship and the grim reality of living in small countries the world often seems to have forgotten. ''I miss Yugoslavia,'' said Mr. Troha, 33, a Slovene entrepreneur, from a warehouse crammed with his collection of Yugoslav memorabilia, including portraits of Tito, vintage sewing machines, Serbian dolls and 50-year-old bottles of Cockta, the Yugoslav Coca-Cola. ''We didn't have anything, but we had everything.'' Cultural observers here say nostalgia for Yugoslavia is manifesting itself in different ways. Nearly 5,000 Slovenian youths made a pilgrimage to Belgrade, the former Yugoslavia's capital and now the capital of Serbia, to celebrate the New Year. Cross-border investment among the former Yugoslavia republics has seldom been higher. The ''.yu'' Internet domain name remains popular on Web sites. Croats have been discarding ethnic rivalries to vote for Serbian songs during the Eurovision Song Contest. Basketball, a unifying passion in the former Yugoslavia, is played in a league that includes teams from across the region. All the while, Tito's image is still used to sell everything from computers to beer. In the northern Serbian city of Subotica, one businessman, Blasko Gabric, was so distraught when the name of his former country, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, was finally abolished on Feb. 4, 2003, that he decided to build Yugoland, a four-acre Yugoslav theme park, complete with a mini-Adriatic Sea and a model of Mount Triglav, Yugoslavia's highest peak. He said the number of visitors had recently exploded. ''As far as I am concerned, I am still a citizen of Yugoslavia,'' he said. ''Today, we have democracy and nothing in our pockets.'' Here in Slovenia, a prosperous country of two million, Yugonostalgia is all the more surprising because the country this year will celebrate the 17th anniversary of its decision to become the first republic to secede from Yugoslavia. It did not experience the brutal wars of its neighbors, its economy is thriving, it is a member of NATO and it recently became the first formerly Communist country to assume the rotating presidency of the European Union. But Mr. Troha, who will open a Nostalgia Museum with his collection, said Slovenians nevertheless missed belonging to a large multicultural country of 23 million people that everybody knew. Critics of Yugonostalgia -- and there are many -- say it is driven by a dangerous and anachronistic fringe of crybabies who crave the social safety net of the Communist era and the cult of personality of Tito while ignoring the poverty, the rabid nationalism and 1,000 percent inflation of the 1990s, not to speak of the political repression and the censorship. ''I am puzzled by this nostalgia,'' said Dimitrij Rupel, Slovenia's foreign minister. ''People say it was not so bad, that socialism was more human. But everyone was egalitarian in the former Yugoslavia because everyone was poor. Yugoslavia was a dictatorship.'' For others, however, being Yugonostalgic means going back to a time of multicultural co-existence before Yugoslavia collapsed, before the autocracy of Slobodan Milosevic and before the Balkan wars of the 1990s in which at least 125,000 people died. ''Yugonostalgia expresses the pain of a severed limb that is no longer there,'' said Ales Debeljak, a prominent Slovene cultural critic. In Velenje, a onetime socialist model town in Slovenia still known by some as ''Tito's Velenje,'' a statue of Tito dominates the town square. Vlado Vrbic, a local historian, said Slovenians were Yugonostalgic because even if Tito kept tight control at home, Yugoslavs enjoyed free education and health care, open borders, a job for life, interest-free home loans, generous pensions and, above all, peace. ''The Yugoslav passport was the best in the world, and you could travel anywhere,'' said Mr. Vrbic, who at 16 hitchhiked from Ljubljana to India. ''In the former Yugoslavia, the pension was guaranteed, so you didn't need to save anything and the workday ended at 2 in the afternoon.'' Peter Lovsin, the lead singer of a punk band in the former Yugoslavia, agrees. Mr. Lovsin, who also founded Yugoslavia's best-selling sex magazine in the late 1980s, argued that Yugonostalgia was an outgrowth of the former Yugoslavia's heady mix of laziness and relative liberalism. Mr. Lovsin, whose lyrics ''Comrades, I don't believe you'' became a subversive anti-Communist anthem in the late 1970s, said the band was never censored. ''Slovenia today is more dangerous than Iraq because Slovenia is so depressing,'' he said. ''In Yugoslavia, people had fun. It was a system for lazy people; if you were good or bad, you still got paid. Now, everything is about money, and this is not good for small people.'' Such idealized notions of the past irk historians like Joze Dezman, director of the National Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, who says they ignore Tito's role in creating the mess and the carnage that followed. ''An abused child tries to rationalize his abuse and get out of the unpleasant reality by romanticizing the past,'' Mr. Dezman said. ''But no one is calling for the reunification of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia is dead.''
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1127 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final World Spurns Bail for Profit, But It's a Pillar of U.S. Justice BYLINE: By ADAM LIPTAK SECTION: Section A; Column 0; National Desk; AMERICAN EXCEPTION; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 1739 words DATELINE: FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. Wayne Spath is a bail bondsman, which means he is an insurance salesman, a social worker, a lightly regulated law enforcement agent, a real estate appraiser -- and a for-profit wing of the American justice system. What he does, which is posting bail for people accused of crimes in exchange for a fee, is all but unknown in the rest of the world. In England, Canada and other countries, agreeing to pay a defendant's bond in exchange for money is a crime akin to witness tampering or bribing a juror -- a form of obstruction of justice. Mr. Spath, who is burly, gregarious and intense, owns Brandy Bail Bonds, and he sees his clients in a pleasant and sterile office building just down the street from the courthouse here. But for the handcuffs on the sign out front, it could be a dentist's office. ''I've got to run, but I'll never leave you in jail,'' Mr. Spath said, greeting a frequent customer in his reception area one morning a couple of weeks ago. He turned to a second man and said, ''Now, don't you miss court on me.'' Other countries almost universally reject and condemn Mr. Spath's trade, in which defendants who are presumed innocent but cannot make bail on their own pay an outsider a nonrefundable fee for their freedom. ''It's a very American invention,'' John Goldkamp, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, said of the commercial bail bond system. ''It's really the only place in the criminal justice system where a liberty decision is governed by a profit-making businessman who will or will not take your business.'' Although the system is remarkably effective at what it does, four states -- Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon and Wisconsin -- have abolished commercial bail bonds, relying instead on systems that require deposits to courts instead of payments to private businesses, or that simply trust defendants to return for trial. Most of the legal establishment, including the American Bar Association and the National District Attorneys Association, hates the bail bond business, saying it discriminates against poor and middle-class defendants, does nothing for public safety, and usurps decisions that ought to be made by the justice system. Here as in many other areas of the law, the United States goes it alone. American law is, by international standards, a series of innovations and exceptions. From the central role played by juries in civil cases to the election of judges to punitive damages to the disproportionate number of people in prison, the United States has charted a distinctive and idiosyncratic legal path. Bail is meant to make sure defendants show up for trial. It has ancient roots in English common law, which relied on sworn promises and on pledges of land or property from the defendants or their relatives to make sure they did not flee. America's open frontier and entrepreneurial spirit injected an innovation into the process: by the early 1800s, private businesses were allowed to post bail in exchange for payments from the defendants and the promise that they would hunt down the defendants and return them if they failed to appear. Commercial bail bond companies dominate the pretrial release systems of only two nations, the United States and the Philippines. The flaw in the system most often cited by critics is that defendants who have not been convicted of a crime and who turn up for every court appearance are nonetheless required to pay a nonrefundable fee to a private business, assuming they do not want to remain in jail. ''Life is not fair, and I probably would feel the same way if I were a defendant,'' said Bill Kreins, a spokesman for the Professional Bail Agents of the United States, a trade group. ''But the system is the best in world.'' The system costs taxpayers nothing, Mr. Kreins said, and it is exceptionally effective at ensuring that defendants appear for court. Mr. Spath's experience confirms that. If Mr. Spath considers a potential client a good risk, he will post bail in exchange for a nonrefundable 10 percent fee. In a 35-month period ending in November, his records show, Mr. Spath posted about $37 million in bonds -- 7,934 of them. That would suggest revenues of about $1.3 million a year, given his fee. Mr. Spath, who is 62, has seven bail agents working for him, including his daughters Tia and Mia. ''It probably costs me 50 grand a month to run this business,'' he said. Mr. Spath hounds his clients relentlessly to make sure they appear for court. If they do not, he must pay the court the full amount unless he can find them and bring them back in short order. Only 434 of his clients failed to appear for a court date over that period, and Mr. Spath straightened out 338 of those cases within the 60 days allowed by Florida law. In the end, he had to pay up only 76 times. That is a failure rate of less than 1 percent. But he had just taken a $100,000 hit. ''Everything I worked for this year, I lost because of that one guy,'' he said. ''If I write a bad bond, it takes me 17 to make it right.'' Mr. Spath had thought the defendant, accused of drug trafficking, was a good bet because he had been cooperating with the government. The defendant is in Brazil now, but Mr. Spath is very good at finding people, and he is not giving up. He is working travel records, phone companies and a former girlfriend, and he is getting closer. He sometimes requires collateral in addition to his fee, and has accepted rugs, an airplane and a winning Rhode Island lottery ticket. But mostly he is interested in houses. ''In this business, you have to understand real estate,'' Mr. Spath said. When the real estate market goes south, he said, bail bondsmen get hurt. According to the Justice Department and academic studies, the clients of commercial bail bond agencies are more likely to appear for court in the first place and more likely to be captured if they flee than those released under other forms of supervision. That may be because bail bond companies have financial incentives and choose their clients carefully. They also have more power. In many states, bond enforcement agents, sometimes called bounty hunters, may break into homes of defendants without a warrant, temporarily imprison them and move them across state lines without entering into the extradition process. Still, critics say, efficiency and business considerations should not trump the evenhanded application of justice. The experiences in states that have abolished commercial bail bonds, prosecutors say, have been mixed. ''The bail bond system is rife with corruption,'' said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore. Since bond companies do not compete on price, they have every incentive to collude with lawyers, the police, jail officials and even judges to make sure that bail is high and that attractive clients are funneled to them. Mr. Kreins, the industry spokesman, acknowledged scandals in Illinois, where ''basically all the agents were in collusion with the judges,'' and in Louisiana, where sheriffs were also in the mix. ''We have acted responsibly every time an incident has occurred to seek stronger legislation,'' Mr. Kreins said. Mr. Marquis, the Oregon prosecutor, said doing away with commercial bonds had affected the justice system in a negative way as well. ''The fact of the matter is,'' he said, ''that in states like Oregon the failure-to-appear rate has skyrocketed.'' Oregon uses a combination of court deposits, promises to appear and restrictions on where defendants can live and work. The rest of the world considers the American system a warning of how not to set up a pretrial release system, F. E. Devine wrote in ''Commercial Bail Bonding,'' a 1991 book that remains the only comprehensive international survey of the subject. He said that courts in Australia, India and South Africa had disciplined lawyers for professional misconduct for setting up commercial bail arrangements. Other countries use a mix of methods to ensure that defendants appear for trial. Some simply keep defendants in jail until trial. Others ask defendants to promise to turn up for trial. Some make failure to appear a separate crime. Some impose strict conditions on release, like reporting to the police frequently. Some make defendants liable for a given sum should they fail to appear but do not collect it up front. Others require a deposit in cash from the defendant, family members or friends, which is returned when the defendant appears. But injecting money into the equation, even without the bond company's fee, is the exception. ''Even purged of commercialism, most countries avoid a bail system based chiefly on financial security deposits,'' Mr. Devine wrote. In the United States, the use of commercial bail bonds is rising, and they became the most popular form of pretrial release in 1998. More than 40 percent of felony defendants released before trial paid a bail bond company in 2004, up from 24 percent a decade earlier, according to the Justice Department. Forty percent of people released on bail are eventually acquitted or have the charges against them dropped. Quite a few of them paid a substantial and nonrefundable fee to remain free in the meantime. Kate Santana, a 20-year-old waitress, had spent eight days in jail when she found her way to Mr. Spath. ''Me and my husband got into a fight,'' Ms. Santana explained, ''and the cops were called and I was arrested because there was a bite mark on his shoulder.'' Mr. Spath took her $200 and posted her $2,000 bail. ''I checked her criminal history out,'' he said. ''I found out she was a mother and really she shouldn't be in jail.'' But when a friend of a man accused of identity theft and perjury turned up seeking a $16,000 bond, Mr. Spath took a different attitude. ''You bet your fanny I'm going to take collateral,'' he said. ''I'll take his firstborn.'' Mr. Spath is not much concerned with how the rest of the world views commercial bail bonds, but he was worked up about recent talk of a greater government role in pretrial release here in Broward County. ''Here's what everybody forgets,'' he said. ''The taxpayers have to pay for these programs. Why should they pay for them? Why should they? When we can provide the same service for free. I'd rather see the money spent in parks, mental health issues, the homeless. Let the private sector do it. We do it better.''
Wayne Spath, a bondsman in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., posts bail for defendants he considers to be good risks for a 10 percent fee. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY BARBARA P. FERNANDEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg.A16) CHART: PRETRIAL RELEASES: The number of felony defendants released before trial through commercial bail companies is growing, according to a study of state courts in the 75 largest counties. The study also found that such defendants were more likely to appear in court than those released under other pretrial conditions. Critics say the study failed to account for differences in local conditions and individual cases. (Source: ''Pretrial Release of Felony Defendants in State Courts,'' Bureau of Justice Statistics) DOCUMENT-TYPE: Series PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1128 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Prowling the Skies in Search of Ringless Fingers BYLINE: By JANIS SPINDEL; As told to JOAN RAYMOND. By Janis Spindel, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; FREQUENT FLIER; Pg. 9 LENGTH: 507 words I LOVE traveling, especially when someone else is paying for it. I'm not a recruiter for a Fortune 500 company. I'm a professional matchmaker and have been since founding my company in 1993. I deal only with male clients. And on recent trips to Vancouver, Boston, Charlotte and Seattle, more than 1,000 women showed up in each city to meet with me and to see if they qualified to be matched with one of my men. I'm always scouting for people. I've found that airports and airplanes are great hunting grounds. In fact, I met my first boyfriend at an airport. I find people wherever I go and don't miss an opportunity when I see someone I think might be right for my database. Whether I'm at a restaurant, a play or sitting in an airplane, I will start a conversation with anyone, anywhere, anytime. That person may turn out to be a perfect client. Or the perfect woman for one of my clients. My clientele are investment bankers, lawyers, professional athletes and entrepreneurs. They are all very successful, fabulous and picky. They know what kind of qualities they want in a woman, and they hire me to find their perfect partner. It often takes me just a week or two to match a client with the right person. My success rate speaks for itself; so does my sixth sense. In the last 15 years, I've been responsible for more than 800 marriages and 1,000 more couples have entered into long-term, committed relationships. I fly first or business class. But I'll walk up and down the entire plane scouting people. I did meet a man in coach who turned out to be a gazillionaire. He just likes to fly economy. Many people I approach are impressed by my gutsiness. I was in Phoenix recently, preparing to board a flight to Los Angeles. I saw an extremely handsome man walking through the airport carrying multiple tennis rackets. I chased him down. I tracked another fellow through baggage claim and literally ran up to him at the rental car area. I was out of breath, but interviewed him on the spot. My approach is straightforward. First, I'll check out the ring finger. If there's no ring, I'll say something flattering. Of course, a man's initial thought is that I'm hitting on him. I consider these meetings pre-dates. I can usually find out more about someone in five minutes than most people can in three months. Most men are receptive, though some find it amusing they spent the flight talking to a happily married matchmaker. I often think that airport bars may not be the best place to meet people. I don't see a lot of talking. Most are focused on their travels. But you never know. Fate can step in. I was flying to Toronto recently and saw a guy on the flight I wanted to meet. But I didn't get a chance to talk to him. As fate would have it, he was on the return flight later that day. I didn't waste one minute. He's now a client. So strike up a conversation with someone. You never know. And if you see a woman cruising the airplane aisles, checking you out, don't be afraid. It's not the air marshal. It's probably me. Directory: ~hesterj -> Entrepreneur Entrepreneur -> Byline: By richard siklos section: Section C; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 Length Download 3.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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