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MOUNTAIN VIEWS: FEMA FALLING FOR FLORIDIAN FRAUD

By John Hanchette

OLEAN -- American taxpayers apparently have become inured to the waves of governmental stupidity, fraud, corruption and greed that wash over them on a daily basis.


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An example is the current hurricane aftermath cupidity making big news in Florida but hardly drawing a paragraph in northern newspapers, probably because so far the scandal only involves $28 million of your money and mine -- an amount we've learned to laugh about or ignore as chump change in an era of billion-dollar white-collar thefts from our wallets.

It seems the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was extraordinarily quick and generous in handing out relief checks to residents in the Miami-Dade County area in the wake of the multiple hurricanes that ravaged Florida during late summer and early autumn.

FEMA, according to an investigation by the Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale, has handed out at least the above amount so far for new cars, new TVs, new refrigerators, new furniture, all sorts of minor appliances, and just about anything an alert homeowner would need to replace after a devastating storm.

Only one thing wrong with that. The four storms never touched Miami or Dade County. Not even as breeze. They raked much of the rest of Florida, but they didn't even come within 100 miles of that spared area. As usual, federal vigilance in perusing the claims was less than intense. Some of the money went to several bold claimants who put down ice and snow as the cause of their damage.

In Miami. Brilliant. Ice and snow.

Reporters (and now federal investigators) have turned up witnesses who actually saw their neighbors watering used couches and other possessions on the front lawn with garden hoses to make sure they sported the necessary damage to trigger a fat check -- a noble waste of time, as it turned out, since the feds rarely checked.

The regional FEMA head has displayed the arrogance (and probable good legal sense) to make himself scarce and to refuse to talk to reporters. It won't do much good. Florida lawmakers, veteran probers for certain committees of Congress, various federal watchdog agencies that monitor spending and criminal investigators are climbing all over South Florida now.

It all reminds me of a similar incident following a South Florida citrus freeze in 1977 shortly after I arrived in that state to run the Gannett News Service capital bureau in Tallahassee. One of Gannett's best reporters -- with the approval of the local district attorney -- went through the relief line for damaged citrus ranchers and fruit growers several times. By changing only his name and the style of baseball hat he was wearing each trip, the journalist managed to draw several freeze relief checks worth thousands of dollars. At no time was he asked to supply sophisticated identification.

One big difference though, between that incident and the current bamboozle. The ill-gotten crop relief money was returned to government coffers. So far, the taxpayers haven't enjoyed that response to the current hurricane fraud. I don't remember if anyone went to jail in the citrus freeze scandal, or even got immersed in bureaucratic hot water. Probably not. It's no wonder the federal and state governments now routinely try to keep reporters from doing their jobs. These days, for public officials, it could involve their very freedom.


Movies do not interest me much anymore. I tend to squirm or sleep or eat too much popcorn and chocolate-covered raisins in reaction to most film efforts I attend. But over Thanksgiving, I watched two films that are worth comment.

The first, "National Treasure" with Nicholas Cage and Jon Voight, was a "history mystery" -- a genre I'm happy to see gaining popularity. It was produced by Walt Disney Pictures, so viewers were pretty well assured an avoidance of the needless gore and mayhem so overdone and prevalent on screens today. I wanted to see it because the plot of "National Treasure" involves a conspiracy rooted in the Middle Ages, a period I favor in reading novels and history books.

Cage is Benjamin Franklin Gates, who descends from a founding family that has earned the reputation among historians of being loopy cranks who are always fruitlessly searching for a fabled treasure once belonging to the Knights Templar (you may recall them from "The Da Vinci Code," the best-selling novel by Dan Brown). The vast and priceless treasure, which includes ancient jewels and documents, was allegedly brought to America by the secretive Order of Freemasons, among whose members we find many of the men who birthed the United States and tore us away from Great Britain's oppressive rule.

Cage, who in films can be very distracting with his peculiar mannerisms, plays it straight in this one and gets excellent acting support from his father, Patrick Henry Gates (played by Voight), but very little support in searching for the lode -- which the father has come to believe is a myth concocted during the Revolutionary War to distract the British.

The movie and its premise start with much promise as Cage -- and a comely National Archives curator (Diane Kruger) who falls in love with him -- move smartly from clue to intricate clue, including the dollar bill and the Liberty Bell. The biggest clue, however, is on the back of the original Declaration of Independence, and the movie turns into a quest film as the patriotic Cage steals the seminal document to keep it out of the hands of a fellow treasure hound, a dastardly Brit played with great verve by Sean Bean. Once he has the founding document, of course, Cage can't keep himself from fooling around with all sorts of potentially harmful chemical applications in trying to find the clue on its reverse side.

Here the film goes a bit awry in turning into a fairly trite chase movie, with all the usual characters -- the dunderhead FBI agents, the blundering but determined Brits, the idealistic Americans, the unimaginative historians. The movie turns quickly into a breathless action tour of American tourist sites in Washington, New York and Philadelphia. There's a Hudson River escape scene and lots of blather about the global corruptive power of a treasure so immense.

Of course, the huge treasure is found, the clever Cage is proven correct in his theories after all, the hoard is divided to go to the benefit of all mankind, and everybody gets to buy an expensive car and fabulous mansion. Despite the predictable outcome, it's a film worth watching, but in the end I found myself -- heaven help me -- wishing for a little less saccharine Disney idealism and a bit more realistic violence attendant to a pile of loot that big.

Something for everyone here, but a missed opportunity for some more imaginative filmmaking on a potentially fascinating subject.

The second movie was the much-touted "Alexander" directed by Oliver Stone and starring Colin Farrell as Alexander the Great, one of the most fascinating historical figures of all time, and the only twenty-something so far to conquer the known world.

Stone, in his usual fashion, ignores a lot of intriguing history in favor of advancing the plot, but he should be given credit for covering so much of it in just under three hours -- a time span I thought would drag, but doesn't. This movie is no listless documentary.

Much of the tub-thumping and Hollywood hack publicity on the tube made prospective viewers believe the sub-theme would center on the long-held speculation that Alexander was bisexual, and spent many of his 32 years grooming blatant homosexual relationships, the main one being with boyhood friend and adult military companion Hephaestion (impressively played by Jared Leto).

The prerelease publicity hinted darkly at stark and homoerotic scenes which would surely be controversial. Nope. All very tasteful and implied, even though unmistakably intended to show that Alexander had dual sexual interests. Despite that, several offended individuals stalked out of the theater I was in when Alexander riveted his first soulful gaze upon Hephaestion.

Alexander actually did marry -- the event accurately filmed by Stone as marriage to a princess from present day Uzbekistan, an unhappy woman who produced a male heir, killed after Alexander's death by his sparring rivals.

Despite about 50 major ones to choose from, Stone picks as his main battle scene the historically significant bloodbath at Gaugamela -- a shrubless desert plain in present-day Iraq (near Mosul and Irbil) which hosted one of military history's most brilliant cavalry maneuvers, conceived by the innovative Alexander. This epic fight tore the fourth-century B.C. Persian Empire away from the great Darius III, despite Alexander being outnumbered in men and horses.

Here's a surprise. The best acting in the whole film comes from the beautiful but volatile Angelina Jolie, who plays Alexander's plotting, devious and domineering mother, Olympias. She is entwined in snakes -- big ones -- throughout, but seems quite comfortable in the role despite a zany accent that has rightly been compared to Natasha's from the old "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoon show. Nonetheless, Jolie dazzles and shows heretofore unsuspected range.

Also excellent in this movie is Sir Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemy I, a trusted general for Alexander, and later founder of the dynasty which ruled Egypt for many decades. Stone saves years of time by having Hopkins narrate in memory several key occurrences in Alexander's life.

Not surprisingly, Stone portrays Alexander's still-controversial death at 32 as due to the most dramatic of possibilities -- poison. Historical theories abound, ranging from pneumonia to inexplicable fever to blood sepsis to bad food to plague to a bite from a pet monkey. The prestigious "New England Journal of Medicine" advanced one earlier this year that seemed to support those who believe Alexander died from a case of typhoid fever.

But Stone has him croak (with scenes at the start and end of the film) after draining a flagon of tainted wine during a randy party following his army's return to Babylon. Some historians support this version, which seems quite plausible. It might be best to take the kiddies to some other film during this holiday season. They're used to seeing humans killed on TV and in computer games, but the anguishing bloodshed experienced by innocent animals in this one is sure to upset them. Alexander's famed and mighty horse Bucephalus dies a detailed and repeated-sequence battle death in Stone's film, and other mammals -- including several Indian war elephants -- are maimed and killed on screen in gratuitously bloody scenes.

All in all, though, a worthy film for teens and adults to take in this season.


John Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University, is a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent. He was a founding editor of USA Today and was recently named by Gannett as one of the Top 10 reporters of the past 25 years. He can be contacted via e-mail at Hanchette6@aol.com.

Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com Nov. 30 2004