Lisa Antonelli Bacon

The Front Line--STYLE Weekly 2/4/04
by Lisa Antonelli Bacon

Eleven o’clock on a bitter January night, and John Venuti is going back to work.

Never mind that he wrapped a nine-hour day just a little while ago. Never mind that it’s the coldest night of the year to date. Someone’s been murdered.

When someone is murdered in Richmond, Venuti puts on a tie and heads to the scene, day or night, freezing rain or stifling heat. There was a time when it was rare for a lieutenant to go to every homicide scene. But that was before Venuti.

By the time he gets to the scene in the East End, a phalanx of detectives is scrambling back and forth across the street, looking for evidence, possible witnesses, or any clues to why a 54-year-old nip-joint owner was shot to death in his apartment. Standing under a streetlight, a young assistant commonwealth’s attorney is trying to take notes with stiff, frozen fingers. Although it’s pushing midnight and the street is fairly empty, patrol officers are stationed around the perimeter, protecting the crime scene from the curious. As an unmarked van pulls up with the forensics team, a mobile command unit the size of a rock-star tour bus is making its way up Church Hill. Soon the area is buzzing like a bank lobby on a Friday afternoon.

A year ago, the scene would’ve been different. With the Richmond Police Department’s Violent Crimes Division overworked and undermanned, the murderers were winning. “We were floundering and overwhelmed,” says Learned Barry, deputy commonwealth’s attorney and a veteran murder prosecutor. “There were too many killers and too few homicide officers to solve an ever-increasing backlog of murders.”

In a town where some years have seen well over 100 killings, last year’s final count of 94 was still alarmingly high. Now Richmond police officers believe they have just the plan to bring the tally down. It’s a simple idea: find out who’s behind the killings, and remove them from the street using any means necessary.

Last spring, when Venuti took over the Violent Crimes Division, he took a crack at restructuring the responsibilities of the unit. He added a layer of sergeants to lead the five detective teams (two to cover homicides, one for aggravated assaults, one for malicious woundings and one for robberies). That layer eased the load on detectives who previously had to track down enough evidence to take cases to court, keep witnesses alive and, oh yes, arrest killers.

Then Venuti began to reach out to any and every agency that could make life miserable for the bad guys. Eight months later, police say that results are beginning to show. The numbers vary. December 2002’s body count was 12; December 2003’s count was 3. January 2003 saw 9; in January 2004, the count was 10.

Since late last summer, the office of Commonwealth’s Attorney David Hicks has tried and convicted more than 20 murderers, Barry says. “We’ve got 10 more in the pipeline now,” he says. “Nobody in the state does 30 murder cases in less than six months.” More importantly, Barry says, the new plan likely is preventing murders. Although the homicide division’s clearance rate (the cases resulting in arrests) was around 50 percent last year, “the percentage of getting known murderers off the street is much higher,” Barry says. “That has a huge impact on the murder rate.”

Around police headquarters, the plan is informally referred to as Murderer Removal. “We don’t worry about clearance, we don’t worry about conviction,” Barry says. “Our sole goal is to get them off the street, one way or another.”

According to Venuti, the difference is in the quantity and the quality of the resources at his disposal. True enough. But if you trace all the tentacles back to the center, you’ll find Venuti working the phones, calling in favors, inviting any and everyone who can make a whit of difference to get in his game. Although he denies it like a guy facing triple murder, observers and participants say that Venuti is the mastermind of the strategy that might make a dent in Richmond’s reputation as a murder capital.



Venuti deflects credit for Murderer Removal’s success to Police Chief André Parker and Detective Division Capt. Peggy Horn. But if you look at Venuti’s career path, you have to notice that he is the common denominator among the resources pooled for the program. As a Richmond detective, he’s been attached to the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He’s also worked for the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. So when Venuti can’t drum up enough evidence to make a murder charge stick, he calls in adjunct team members from those places to close the deal.

“People don’t realize that even if we can’t catch the murderers, we often know who they are,” Barry says. “And if we can’t get them on murder, someone else can get them for something.” He recalls a case when detectives were convinced that five drug dealers were responsible for at least one murder. Evidence was hard to come by. “We reached out to the federal authorities, and they were able to put together a drug conspiracy case,” he says. All five went to prison. It’s the strategy that Murderer Removal is based upon. “Venuti brings every arm of law enforcement to bear on a problem,” Barry says. “That’s the key: putting groups together.”

Under the Murderer Removal plan, options aren’t limited to traditional law enforcement. Now it’s routine to begin an investigation with Community Assisting Police, known as CAPS, a program designed to eliminate nuisance slum housing.

If a house is a continual problem as a drug nest or a criminal refuge, explains Sgt. Emmett Williams, whose team is working tonight’s murder, officials can shut it down for code violations. “I can lock up everybody in the house,” Williams says. But such a solution is usually temporary, because people get out of jail, or new scofflaws move in. “CAPS has the authority to bulldoze the house,” he says.

Barry recalls a situation last year in which CAPS investigated a building known to be a criminal hideout. After citing it for neglect and fire code violations, CAPS razed the building. “They actually physically took the house down,” he says. “Suddenly those people were on the street and visible again.”

By 12:30 a.m., the CAPS report is in: The apartment was leased to the victim, and the utilities are in his girlfriend’s name. Although the apartment is a known nip joint, with the guy who poured the drinks dead, the building won’t be a problem any time soon.



By 1 a.m. on this January night, three suspects have been apprehended. Shortly after a description of the getaway car went out over the radio, a Henrico patrolman spotted it at a Citgo gas station and notified Richmond police. Within 30 minutes, Richmond police cars have surrounded the vehicle and are headed back downtown, suspects in tow. When news of the apprehension spreads to the crime scene, tension at the scene drops a notch.

“You can feel the difference,” Venuti says. If the suspects weren’t in-hand, his chilled-to-the-bone detectives would be going door to door, waking neighbors, hoping someone had seen or heard something. Now, they’re crammed into a couple of cars, trying to stay warm while they wait for the medical examiner.

Every square inch of floor or ground around the body is part of the crime scene for Venuti’s team. But the body itself is the medical examiner’s crime scene, and someone has to protect it until the examiner gets there. But the whole team? When they could be doing just as much or more in well-heated offices?

“The team is here,” Venuti explains.

So?

“The team is here.” That’s how they work. End of conversation.

Even though it’s closing in on 2 a.m., a visibly drunk, mildly cantankerous upstairs neighbor of the recently deceased hollers from a second-floor porch.

“Hey,” she calls to Venuti, who doesn’t hear her at first. “HEY!” she yells, getting his attention. “Can I go?”

“You have to wait a couple of minutes, OK?” Venuti tells her.

For all the bodies he’s seen, for all the professional bad guys he’s mixed with, he isn’t inclined to raise his voice, and he doesn’t take offense.



Back at headquarters, Venuti heads for the break room. He’s about 6 feet tall and about 170 pounds, with fashionably buzzed hair and a mustache. He isn’t physically huge, but he’s got a big persona, with a quick stride and an unfiltered Queens accent. He pours the night’s first cup of Joe. Calm and determined, his jitters don’t show, even though he approaches coffee-drinking like it’s an Olympic sport. A sign over the coffee pot reminds users to clean up: “The public might call us pigs, but we don’t have to live like them.”

The three suspects are isolated in separate rooms. Since police believe the three might be responsible for a string of robberies over the last several months, robbery Detective Mike Nacy has stayed way past the end of his shift. Two of the suspects are brothers. The younger one is 16, an eighth-grader at Tuckahoe Middle School. A third suspect, known as “Blimp,” looks older and more experienced than the others. What the suspects don’t know is that their every move is transmitted to television screens in a nearby monitor room. The picture on the screens is so clear you can see a silvery thread of drool running from Blimp’s mouth to his lap.

After letting them foment a while, Williams comes into the frame and asks the juvenile what’s all the red stuff on his jacket. “Throw up,” the kid tells him, before going face down in his own lap. Meanwhile, the kid’s cell phone is ringing in the monitor room. Nacy is checking the phone numbers that come up.

Soon, Williams is back in the monitor room watching both screens at once, as detectives in the interviewing rooms continue the questioning. “That one,” Williams says, pointing to one of the brothers. “He’s the one that will crack. He’s leaning forward. He’s paying attention.”

Everyone, including Mike Jagels, the assistant prosecutor on duty tonight, hopes Williams is right. Jagels is one of Hicks’ pride of young lions in the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office. Until recently, commonwealth’s attorneys’ offices typically had one or two prosecutors who were murder-trial specialists, handling every murder that came over the transom. But last year, taking a page from Venuti’s playbook, Hicks sought ways to more effectively use his office in Murderer Removal. He quickly saw the obvious: train as many energetic young prosecutors as possible to win murder cases. “Hicks now has 12 young Huns that go after any murderer they’re assigned,” Barry says. Since Murderer Removal began to take shape, every one on the murder trial team has put away at least one murderer.

To Barry’s mind, there was one piece of the puzzle missing. The team needed funds to protect witnesses who testify — money for food, sometimes lodging, and security. “I’ve been screaming about this for 25 years,” Barry says. “If you don’t protect witnesses, you don’t win cases. Many times, we know who’s committed the murder, and when we go to the average citizen and ask them to testify in court, they literally laugh and ask if we’re crazy. They can’t live in their neighborhood and testify in court.”

Barry believed Murderer Removal “could make another dozen cases a year, if we could just convince witnesses to testify.” So following Venuti’s lead, Barry reached out to a former assistant commonwealth’s attorney. As Barry tells it, one phone call to City Councilman Manoli Loupassi was all it took.

From his days as a prosecutor, Loupassi knew the value of keeping witnesses alive to testify. “Witness testimony is a huge part of getting a conviction,” Loupassi says. By late last summer, City Council had dedicated $100,000 witness protection. The next piece of the puzzle was in place.



As morning bears down, Jagels heads for bed so he can face another day in court. In the monitor room, Nacy appears at Williams’ side with a trash can. Inside is a tissue one of the suspects used to blow his nose. The idea is to test the DNA to determine if this suspect can be connected to any pending crimes.

The door cracks and Venuti slides in, careful not to spill from the Styrofoam cup that seems glued to his hand. He lays a digital photo down in front of the monitors. It’s a picture of a woman’s watch resting on the red leather seat of the car in which the suspects were arrested. The victim’s girlfriend has just identified the watch as the one taken from her by the two young men who shot her boyfriend.

The pieces are finally coming together. Thanks to the first patrolman to reach the scene, detectives know that the suspect with the pistol fired first, followed by a few blasts from an AK-47 assault rifle by the other. “That officer did a really good job,” Venuti says of the patrol unit. “The witness was hysterical when he got there. He calmed her down and got a really good description of the suspects and what went down.” Don’t underestimate the power of patrolmen in Murderer Removal, he says. “We can’t do it without those guys.”

But murder cases aren’t built on eyewitness testimony alone. There has to be more. But even nuanced interrogation techniques aren’t getting cogent answers from these suspects. The guys are apparently drunk or stoned or both — or acting. Frustrated, the detectives and a couple of uniformed officers gather in twos and threes, in offices and in the hall. Everyone whispers, because the walls don’t block sound well.

“The gun has to be somewhere,” Williams says. In the brief period of time between the shooting and the arrests, “they had to go someplace not too far to get rid of the gun.” Someone notes that both brothers have said in questioning that they had been at Blimp’s earlier in the night. Without pause, Venuti dispatches a unit to search Blimp’s mother’s house for the gun.



Williams goes to his office to take a breather. Posted on a sheet of paper in the sightline of his desk is a list headed “Goals for 2004.” Williams is concerned with three:

— Robbery unit & FADE (Firearms and Drug Enforcement).

— Reduce murders in public housing communities.

— Sustain clearance rates.

He’s beginning to elaborate on goals when Chris Moore, a bright, young detective who has been interviewing one of the suspects, seeks him out. Moore isn’t giving up, but he’s frustrated. “He’s driving me all over town,” he says of one suspect. Williams just smiles. “Walk him through the garden a few times,” he tells Moore. “Then hit him hard.”

On the monitor, Williams watches as Moore gives the suspect a bottle of water, the first step on the garden walk. In the monitor room, the sound is so good you can hear the suction of the kid’s lips on the bottle. Moore applies gentle pressure in his questions, then gradually turns up the heat. When it’s time to bring the hammer down, Levin White, another sharp young detective, joins Moore. When conversation stalls, Venuti, in the monitor room, sends instant messages to the interrogators via pager to take a different direction or try a new tactic.

“Your brother is telling me one thing, and you’re saying another,” White tells the kid. Then White moves his chair around so he’s sitting right next to the suspect. It’s hard to tell if White is acting concerned or just crowding him a little. Clearly, the kid can’t tell either, but it’s working. He’s becoming more talkative.

Before the water bottle is empty, the suspect’s initial story has begun to morph into something else. And the new story includes a couple of guns. He seems ready to cave. Then the garden gate closes. “I want to talk to the superintendent,” the kid says abruptly.

Williams takes the cue and comes into frame again. He lets it drop that they got a footprint at the murder scene. Then he leaves the room. In the monitor room, Venuti chuckles as the suspect lifts first one foot, then the other, to check the soles of his shoes.

White moves into frame next. He throws down the digital photo. “What is that lady’s watch in your car?” he asks.

The kid thinks for a second, but he doesn’t have the right answer. “I dunno. I ain’t shot nobody and robbed nobody.” No matter. The police have the footprint and the stolen watch, and investigators discovered the weapon in an abandoned car at Blimp’s. So there’s more than enough evidence to file murder charges.

By 3 a.m., the case is well in hand. As the guys bundle up to face the early morning freeze again, Venuti seems to be pondering that umpteenth cup of coffee for the ride home. But before coats are buttoned, another homicide call comes in. The guys resume buttoning up.

Venuti’s eyes sweep the faces before him. He’d love to tell them to go home. But since he can’t, he smiles tightly, tilts his head in an “Oh, well” fashion, and heads for the coffee pot. S

Re-fighting the Civil War With Government Help------------------ from The New York Times Sept. 27, 2004
Published: The New York Times September 27, 2004--

They arrive in hobnail boots and tattered uniforms, lugging vintage rifles and worn blankets, ready to fight.

On both sides of the Mason-Dixon line they come, without hope of winning, without fear of losing. Weekend after weekend, the outcome is always the same as they live out scripts written in another century on the fields of battle.

They do it for the love of Civil War history, the camaraderie, the experience of living in another time. And typically . . . . .

Interior Design magazine
by Lisa Antonelli Bacon
Interior Design · May 1, 2004


To see all those people dashing around Capitol Hill, file-stuffed bucket totes slung over cardigan-clad shoulders, few fashion observers would have guessed that Kate Spade had no store in Washington, D.C. Such, however, was the case for many years—and many Saturday afternoons of boarding the metro or digging out the car for a shopping expedition to the suburbs. So it's easy to imagine how much the opening of a Georgetown boutique has improved the weekends of bevies of dedicated customers.

From an interiors perspective, the shop represents another kind of improvement: the latest refinement in a retail template that Rogers Marvel Architects has been adapting and perfecting since 1995. That's because virtually all of the handbag label's seven boutiques worldwide are freestanding, whereas the realestate in Georgetown leans to 18th- and 19th-century row houses—now home to shiny new branches of Starbucks Coffee and Häagen-Dazs. "It's like an outdoor mall," says principal Jonathan Marvel.

Boxed in on both sides, Rogers Marvel had only a single facade to draw in foot traffic. The solution was to clad the available surface in a running-bond pattern of Indiana limestone and bring the product to the sidewalk via an external vitrine, a new concept for the brand. "We had to address the issues of the site without veering too far from what we've done in the past," says project architect Eugene Colberg. "So we devised a way to take the storefront and pull it into the motif."

That motif has always incorporated an art-minded perspective—appropriate for architects whose past projects include New York's Studio Museum in Harlem and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Along three sides of the Kate Spade boutique, white display walls are divided into horizontal runs of boxlike compartments, each top-lit to showcase related products as if they were precious objets d'art. A single unit might hold a couple of bags, a few pairs of shoes, or bottles of Kate Spade's perfume Beauty, so there's absolutely no clutter.

Floating in the middle of one sidewall, a 27-foot-square mahogany-stained shelving fixture displays leather-bound notebooks and other writing accessories. Closer to the front of the space, mahogany also backs Kate's Closet, actually more of a mini-office where picture frames, note cards, and pencils keep company with a Dilbert-worthy metal desk and a vintage wooden chair.

The retro motif extends to the rear shoe salon, where a small black-and-white TV screen loops through the 1965 hit Darling with Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde—a favorite of Kate Spade herself. A boudoir-curvy bench, a found piece reupholstered in lipstick-red wool, now comfortably seats four shoppers trying on mules or sling-backs.

The shoe salon's floor-to-ceiling mirror helped Rogers Marvel compensate for an uncharacteristically small space of 1,340 square feet, 350 of which are storage. In fact, the team managed to turn the modest footprint into an opportunity to try out new materials and applications. Six rectangular ceiling coves are illuminated by fluorescent fixtures in Kate Spade's spring palette. For flooring, which has evolved from wood to limestone in past stores, the architects chose carbonized bamboo for ecological reasons as well as for its fresh and distinctive coloration and striations.

Bamboo will be replaced by sturdier terrazzo in Kate Spade stores that Rogers Marvel is currently designing in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, and several other U.S. cities. At each, the evolution continues: The firm pushes design elements forward while maintaining the flirty Kate Spade imprimatur. "Each store is a new layer to the process," says Colberg. In moving from space-oriented freestanding stores to urban or mall-type settings, adds Marvel, "Georgetown was pivotal."

No fancy office for LandAmerica's CEO



by Lisa Antonelli Bacon
for Virginia Business
July 2004

When Lawyer’s Title Insurance Corp. spun off from Universal Leaf in 1991, things didn’t look good for the company. It had just come through two years of poor results, the victim of a stagnant real estate market plagued by high interest rates. All CEO Charles H. Foster Jr. could see was red ink. “It was like the faucet had turned off,” he says.

The 61-year-old Princeton graduate recalls his early days in the corporate hot seat from a cramped, cluttered office at LandAmerica Financial Group’s Richmond headquarters, the holding company for Lawyer’s Title, and the company Foster now heads. “Our values were low. The surprising thing was that no one came in and bought us.” As it turned out, LandAmerica did well by just hanging on, so well that in March of this year the company placed 483rd on the Fortune 500 list, with record revenues of $3.4 billion for 2003, sparked by record-low interest rates and booming real estate sales.

The relatively rapid ascent was an uphill battle all the way. After Lawyer’s Title spun off, it had to reconfigure. “We needed a board of directors, corporate governances; things we didn’t need before,” notes Foster. One thing was clear: Foster had to find ways to cut costs — across the board. When the company moved its Richmond headquarters from the West End to the city’s Southside, the employee cafeteria was the first casualty. “Then we decided what size offices we needed,” he says. All offices, including Foster’s, were trimmed to a standard size: 10 by 15 feet. “And then we looked at staffing requirements.”

A staffing overhaul shaved jobs and replaced them with a cadre of temporary workers and part-timers. Then came the carrot on the stick: Foster tied employee compensation to the company’s performance. The plan worked. “Before you knew it, we’d gotten our costs in line at a time when the real estate industry was in such a poor situation that banks were writing off loans.”

But the plan wasn’t short-term. It became the blueprint that would put LandAmerica, a holding company whose subsidiaries provide real estate transaction services for residential and commercial customers, not only on the Fortune 500, but also on the magazine’s prestigious list of most admired companies.

Even now, the number of employees is a fluid roster that bloats and shrinks in sync with the real estate industry. “Now we’re much more adept [at] having flexible costs associated with the people side of the business,” says Foster. Last year, for instance, the company staffed up with temporary and part-time workers to push through a tsunami of refinancings. The staff is leaner these days since the furious flurry of refis slowed as rates crept up.

Now, with 800 offices and 10,000 agents in the U S., Mexico, Canada and other overseas markets, keeping full-timers happy throughout frequent change is a challenge. Foster found that employee incentive plans were essential to LandAmerica’s future. And, like its work force, the company’s incentive plans move up and down with business volume. Pressed to sum up the corporate philosophy that earned LandAmerica its place among the country’s leading companies, Foster keeps it simple: “Mind your costs, and be disciplined.”

A decade ago, LandAmerica was product-driven. “We did title insurance,” Foster says. “Customers thought of us in those terms.” But industry changes in recent years have found its customers making new and different demands. “Large lenders who drive a lot of loans want a company to provide a variety of services. Because of that, we clearly have a culture driven by customer service.”

“Bundled services” has become a key term in industries from software to banking. Likewise, LandAmerica has sought to be all things to all people in the business of real estate transactions — lenders, developers, real estate agents, attorneys, and property buyers and sellers —handling everything from title searches to closings.

These days the company’s mantra is growth, says Foster. Last year, it expanded the products and services it offers primarily to the mortgage lending community, and it continues to make acquisitions that will help with this goal. It also added a home inspection division and is poised to move into other related areas, such as homeowner warranties. “With the huge rush in revenues, we popped into the Fortune 500,” says Foster. “We want to grow enough to stay there.” But staying on the list will be incidental to Foster’s mission. He says he won’t turn down the heat until LandAmerica is America’s number one service provider for real estate transactions.

BOAT'S BATTLE
STYLE Weekly
11/28/07

by Lisa Antonelli Bacon

John Boatwright III used to swagger into courtrooms like a lion entering a Roman arena: confident, brash and hungry. Whether it was in the heat of litigation or in the chilly brinkmanship of plea negotiations, his forthright manner often irked opponents. Some things change; others never do.

His walk is much slower. And whether he admits it or not, his softer side occasionally forces its way to the surface, only to be snatched back like a kid who shares his ice cream and immediately regrets it. In the old days, he could dish out a courtroom pummeling, and all it took to revive him was a cold beer and a cigarette. Now, there's no beer, no smokes; just Boat, in a tiresome battle that won't end.

There isn't much to say about hepatitis C, other than there is no cure, and it is a miserable, life-altering disease. Cigarettes are verboten when you're on the liver transplant list. And drinking, for Boat, ended in January '06. "I'd had 54 years to slurp up all I could. I had my share and some for others," he says. By that August, he could barely get out of bed. "Up to the summer of '06, I felt fine."

Now, barely more than a year later, he sits sock-footed in jeans and a flannel shirt in the living room of his home near Chippenham Medical Center, a dark red blotch from an iron transfusion swallowing his right forearm.

Boatwright is on short-term disability from his post as capital defender for Virginia's central region. Since the office first opened its doors in 2002 -- offering legal representation to those facing capital offenses — Boat has led it. Turnover has been a big issue, as it always is when the hours are long, the pay seems grossly inadequate, and the clients are people like Ricky Javon Gray (now facing the death penalty for murdering the Harvey family on Jan. 1, 2005).

He's paler, smaller, but he's lost none of his puckish bravado. His wife, Allison, a paralegal, comes home during her lunch break to check on him. "If you can think of it, I've had it," he says. "It" includes iron transfusions, colonoscopies and laser surgery for internal bleeding, to name a few. When his liver got frighteningly sluggish, doctors added a shunt to bypass the liver. In the process, they found he had a 40 percent blockage in one artery, so he underwent another procedure to place a stent in the blocked artery.

One thing hasn't changed: Boat's insistence that all is fine, and he's still in the lead, although that has become a relative issue. "Two days after they put that shunt in, I hadn't felt that good in 20 years," he says.

Although his hands shake a little and his voice isn't as loud, it's the same strident one that was easily recognizable on the third floor of the John Marshall Courthouse. In the 1980s, Boat made his bones in criminal court working for attorney Michael Morchower, known then as "Magic Mike" for his ability to get acquittals and lighter sentences for many clients who might have deserved much worse.

In 1987, Boatwright struck out on his own and formed Boatwright & Linka with attorney Bill Linka, a partnership that lasted until 2002 when Boatwright was named Virginia's first capital public defender.

"You'll find as many who love him as hate him," says Linka, whose firm now practices under the name Richmond Criminal Law. "But regardless of what they think of him, he's always well prepared."

Although Boatwright has spent the last 25 years representing people who could've shared a myriad of diseases, from the common cold to HIV, he has no idea where he contracted hepatitis C. "The only way you can get it is through infected blood products," he says.

It's possible he got it through vaccinations while in basic training for the U.S. Army in 1972. "You lined up front to back, and you rolled up your sleeve. They came along with a [needle] gun and went 'bam' to you, 'bam' to the next guy, and the next guy. Some bled." Because the disease can incubate over years, there is no scientific way to determine where or how he became infected.

"I don't care how I got it," Boatwright says. "I feel good. I'm fine." S

Lip Service....................... from CNN Traveller, July 2005
Lisa Bacon travels halfway around the world to shine a light on the extraordinary work being done in a tiny mission hospital in southern India.
From CNN Traveller, July 2005

Judge Affirms Life Sentence for Teenager in Washington-Area Sniper Killings--New York Times

For a Clean Sweep of Richmond, Former Governor, Now Mayor, Wants a Bigger Broom
From The New York Times, Published: January 16, 2005

Virginia: A Commonwealth Comes of Age
Virginia: A Commonwealth Comes of Age takes a frank look at the emergence, devastation, and re-growth of the birthplace of American commerce, from Jamestown to the 21st century.