In this Bloomberg feature, Rowan Jacobsen presents a current snapshot of the mezcal industry. Mezcal’s allure has been in its artisanal nature, produced in small batches and by families in Mexico, and in Oaxaca in particular, the country’s largest producer. But, as Jacobsen reports, Big Liquor is changing that. As mezcal grows in popularity, the region’s old-school distilleries and agave farms are feeling the threat of “tequilization” as the demand for the spirit increases around the world.
At least five centuries ago, Indigenous Mexicans learned to make spirits from those sugars. At the first sign of a quiote, the plant’s pineapple-shaped heart, known as a piña, is harvested, roasted, mashed, fermented and distilled. The resulting spirit was always known as mezcal, but in the 20th century a handful of wealthy producers in the tequila region moved to differentiate themselves from the rustic versions made by Indigenous mezcaleros elsewhere in Mexico. It was a time when mass-produced goods held more cachet than handmade, and the tequila families invested in factories that could churn out a modern, predictable product. Out went the wood-fired ovens, clay stills and open-air fermentations. In came the gas-powered autoclaves and steel distillation tanks.
One of the things that makes mezcal unique is that all these specs are listed on the back label, beneath the name of the mezcalero responsible. That nerdy tradition has protected mezcal’s authenticity—aficionados know to avoid any bottle that doesn’t dish—and has given some old mezcaleros a rock star status they never expected.
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David Goodman recounts a terrible night on Pamola’s Fury and the difficult decisions a group of climbers had to make. It’s a fast-paced adventure, which also tackles the undercurrent of animosity felt between climbers and rangers as climbing culture developed in the seventies.
In the fading light. Proudman realized they could not make it off the mountain and prepared to bivouac overnight. He used his ice ax to chip a ledge out of the ice and snow — 3 feet wide by 5 feet long — for everyone to gather. He estimated they were within a few hundred feet of the top, but he wouldn’t attempt making it there. He wanted the group to remain together.
A later AMC report included an evaluation of this moment. “In all probability, Bob, Mike, and Doug could have climbed to the ridge by dark and descended back to camp had they not waited,” the report concluded. “It is also quite possible that as a result of such action, all three of the others would have perished.”
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The latest must-have for the wealthy? The freshest, cleanest air. For The New Republic, science journalist Shayla Love toured some of New York City’s high-end buildings to learn about their sophisticated and state-of-the-art filtration systems. (At one complex on the Upper West Side, “[o]utside air is brought in, filtered, treated with an ultraviolet-C light that kills 99.9 percent of pathogens, and completely changed out once per hour.”) In a time of pandemics and wildfires, the desire and demand for excellent indoor air quality has surged, and many luxury real estate listings today attract people with “the promise of an exceptional breathing experience.” In this piece, Love discovers—unsurprisingly—that if you have money, your air will be better.
At night, when Roe’s family is sleeping, it “smells like you’re camping, because the fresh air is getting pumped in at such a rapid rate,” he said. You know the air is good, he told me, because the hydrangeas last. Typically, when cut at the stem and arranged in a vase, the delicate flowers wither and droop in a few days. In his apartment, the blooms will stay perky for nearly two weeks.
In China, the sociocultural anthropologist Victoria Nguyen reported, underground bomb shelters have been converted into communal breathing areas, while wealthier Chinese can afford to go on “lung wash” vacations. For many others, on bad-air days, activities that used to take place in parks—playing cards, exercising, reading the paper—now take place below ground.
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Of all the types of garments we wear, our pants make a big statement—and signal so much about our culture. In this entertaining read on pants trends and fashion, Jonah Weiner explores the shift to baggy and wide-legged after a period of small and skinny at the helm.
In some ways, this shift felt entirely predictable, as if a rubber band stretched tight had snapped back to laxity. And yet it was disconcerting too, as if the rubber band had immediately become a balloon. It could be hard to trust your own eyes. I’d been feeling the rumblings of a Return to Big Pants since about 2017, when I remember worrying about the fact that I was 36 and still wearing essentially the same pants I’d worn at 26. There’s constancy, I thought, and then there’s becoming a relic of yourself — the balding guy still trying to make his high school haircut work. I made the conscious decision to resist fossilization and buy roomier pants, and over the next couple of years, I thought that’s what I did. My wife and my friends tell me they thought I did, too, having seen some of the new pants in question and deemed them conspicuously, if not laughably, large. And yet photographs confirm that, in absolute terms, my pants remained fitted for a while. I couldn’t see it clearly at first, but I was locked in an arms race against my own mounting pants dysmorphia. Trousers that struck me as audaciously large yesterday looked correct today. By tomorrow I would wonder if they weren’t actually a bit close-clinging.
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With the world’s focus on Gaza, settlers in the West Bank have used wartime chaos as cover for violence and dispossession. Investigative journalist Shane Bauer spent time on the ground there. One of his subjects, Bashar Ma’amar, is a Palestinian who documents Israeli aggression and also drives an ambulance:
On October 9th, settlers sent a picture on Facebook to people in Qusra, a few miles from Qaryut, of masked men holding axes, clubs, a gas can, and a chainsaw, with text that read, “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra village, we are waiting for you and we will not feel sorry for you. The day of revenge is coming.” Two days later, at the edge of the village, settlers lit utility poles on fire and tried to break into a house. For a half hour, a family huddled inside; then young men from the village arrived and threw rocks at the Israelis. Ma’amar drove over in his ambulance. At that point, the settlers started shooting. A man handed Ma’amar a six-year-old girl who had been shot. As the man walked away, he was shot and killed. When Ma’amar sped off, he said, settlers fired on his ambulance. Three Palestinians were killed, one of them the son of a man who had been killed by settlers in 2017. Then the Israeli Army stormed the village and killed a thirteen-year-old boy.
The next day, Hani Odeh, the mayor of Qusra, arranged for a procession to transport the bodies from the hospital to the village. Ma’amar took one of them in his ambulance. The I.D.F. dictated the route, then directed mourners to change course to avoid settlers. But dozens of settlers blocked the road and stoned the procession anyway. “I got out and talked to the Israeli commander, begging him to make the settlers leave,” Odeh said. “He told me to turn around.” The settlers killed a sixty-two-year-old man and his twenty-five-year-old son.
“They can’t just continue to unleash the settlers on us like that,” Odeh told me. “My generation has always tried to reason with our youth, but they can no longer take it, so what am I to do? People like me, who advocated for peace their whole lives—we are not respected anymore. They say what did Abu Mazen”—Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority—“ever do for us? And they’re right. He keeps asking people to protest peacefully. Peacefully? There’s nothing peaceful about the situation we’re in.”
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Seven versions of Drag Race and 14 Emmy Awards later, RuPaul Charles has gone from club kid to media mogul—and whether in or out of drag, is utterly comfortable in his own skin. Whether he’s comfortable being profiled is another issue, but that doesn’t stop Ronan Farrow from turning in a nuanced, knowing piece about a man who’s bigger than any box.
A few days later, RuPaul woke up and performed his morning ritual. First, he stretched. “I’m older,” he said. “I have to make sure everything is doing the thing.” Then he prayed, saying aloud the words “Dear God, thank you,” followed by things for which he is grateful. That week, the list included the roof over his head, his access to running water, and Georges, his husband, whom he met while dancing at Limelight, in New York, in the nineties. After that, he meditated, a practice that can last anywhere from forty-five seconds to fifteen minutes. He lets the ideas drift through: “Oh, there’s my father. Oh, there’s Judy Garland.” His demons are there, too, but he claims to have befriended them. He put on another black hoodie and another pair of black workout pants and walked ten minutes to the nearest Marks & Spencer to pick up an apple turnover.
Soon afterward, we sat in the living room of his rental cottage, a modest, two-story structure with neutral walls and a tiny kitchenette to which he had added, as far as I could tell, nothing but a row of identical boxes of berry-flavored Special K. “I brought this in,” he said, pointing to an LCD monitor that sat, with his laptop, on an otherwise empty white desk. “And I moved this chair. That’s about it.” Yet he was crazy about the place—he liked the flow of the floor plan, and took pictures of it, to try to replicate it in Wyoming.
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A good scammer sees opportunity everywhere, including their own downfall. In 2006, the police showed up at Gustav Daphne’s house in Beverly Hills. They had come once before, when a neighbor complained about his trash. Daphne happened to be swimming in his pool at the time, and because he is French, he came to the front door in a tiny little bathing suit. The police were appalled; they gave him a reprimand about storing his garbage more tidily and scurried away.
This time was different. The cops came straight into the house. There were a dozen of them, wearing bulletproof vests. They took him outside in handcuffs and put him in a car. Maybe he was paranoid, having built a multimillion-dollar empire on fraud and deceit, nurturing connections with international criminal rings, but at first he thought that he was being kidnapped. When he saw the jail, he was relieved.
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The feeling was short-lived. The jail was cleaner than those in Europe where he’d been held, but after a couple of hours he demanded a cigarette and was informed that smoking was prohibited. OK, he thought. There must be a way. There’s always a way. He would find the right people, negotiate the right conditions. He had to smoke! He loved to smoke. He loved it more than anything, except for women. He loved women! And smoking, and art, and shopping.
He found someone in the prison whom everyone called El Gordo, a Mexican guy who could hook people up with anything. Daphne asked for cigarettes and was given an address on the outside where he would need to have $300 delivered. This was not a problem. He didn’t crave money, but it was useful, so he accrued it. His mansion had once belonged to a silent film star; he sometimes commuted by helicopter. There wasn’t much Daphne couldn’t afford.
After Daphne’s cousin drove a Bentley to a shady neighborhood and made the cash drop on his behalf, Daphne went back to El Gordo to collect his cigarettes. El Gordo looked at him, then gave him a nicotine patch. “No smoking in prison,” El Gordo said.
By the time Daphne was extradited to Europe to face money laundering charges, which was the reason he’d been arrested in the first place, he had kicked his cigarette habit. He felt great. He was buoyant with health. He boarded a plane to Switzerland in handcuffs, was whisked to a prison near the Alps, and was put in a cell. Waiting for him there was a pouch of tobacco. He resisted for a few hours. Then he smoked the whole thing.
Eventually, Daphne was sent to a prison in France, where he could get anything he wanted: magazines, special meals, the Israeli cigarettes he preferred. His lawyer could also bring him things. So when he saw a segment on TV about climate change policy, he asked his lawyer to bring him more information about France’s plans to reduce emissions. Daphne had a preternatural ability to sniff out criminal prospects, and he’d caught a familiar whiff.
When Daphne read the materials his lawyer provided him, he learned about Europe’s carbon-emissions trading system, the first of its kind in the world. It had grown out of the Kyoto Protocol, the landmark international agreement to reduce global emissions. Sure enough, Daphne told me, he saw the blueprint for what would become his next illicit enterprise. As soon as he’d finished his time in prison, he began gaming the new emissions-trading system.
The scam would help Daphne accrue even more money, and it would make him famous. In the media he cut a dashing figure, partying with celebrities and oligarchs. He maintained his slim physique by avoiding carbohydrates like they were venom and dressed in blazers cut from blue velvet or embroidered with shimmering brocade flowers. He liked to wear a diamond-encrusted Chopard sun pendant on his partially bared chest and was rarely photographed without one of his hundreds of pairs of Tom Ford sunglasses, all aviator-style with gradient lenses. Always, it seemed, he had a cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth.
Reporters dubbed Daphne the “prince of carbon,” but it wasn’t just his flamboyant charisma that elevated him to criminal royalty. So did the nature of his new fraud. Daphne was scamming the fight against climate change by exploiting a policy flaw that left billions for the taking.
No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing.
No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing.
Ishould say here that Gustav Daphne is a pseudonym. He remains a wanted man in France, so when I traveled to meet with him at his gated villa in Tel Aviv, he agreed to speak on the condition that I not use his name—any of his names. (He has a few aliases.) He kept saying what a bad idea it was to talk to me. He had turned over a new leaf, he insisted, and like a freshly avowed ascetic, he nurtured a few simple pleasures: taking his impeccably trained Belgian Malinois on sunset walks along the beach; going horseback riding with his daughters. He tried to steer clear of trouble, though it occasionally sought him out. A few weeks before we met, some masked guys on a motorcycle drove by firing guns at his home; when I visited, the front door was being replaced.
Still, his name is all over the French media. I warned him that, at least in some circles, a pseudonym would be a pretty weak shield for his identity. That was OK with him. He said that he wanted to put the past behind him and focus on his new ventures, like crypto investing. So, no name.
During my visit, Daphne took calls from his lawyers and asked favors of his wife and flirted with acquaintances over WhatsApp. He wore his Tom Ford sunglasses indoors and out. He showed me his art: a large Kandinsky painting in the foyer, a few Chagalls downstairs. The villa had some burly guys on staff and a cleaner from Sri Lanka who picked up after two fluffy indoor dogs that liked to avail themselves of the plush white carpets.
All this is part of Daphne’s downsized lifestyle. He used to have a bigger mansion, with a swimming pool and a tennis court, a gym and a movie theater. He once parked his yacht in the glittering harbors of the Côte d’Azur. But he has fashioned a new life for himself in Israel, which has yet to grant France’s request for his extradition.
Daphne wanted me to know that to him the carbon scam was a negligible chapter in a long and successful criminal career. It wasn’t his most lucrative scheme; it wasn’t even the first opportunity he’d pursued in the lumpish market of environmental interventions conceived by a civilization in ecological peril. Plus, he was just one of many people who ripped off the emissions-trading system.
Daphne and other scammers’ pillaging of Europe’s carbon market constitutes what the media have called “the fraud of the century”—billions of euros were stolen in a matter of months. The shadowy scheme attracted established crime rings and amateur hucksters alike, many of whom knew each other. But the scam lent itself to duplicity: No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing. Its web reached the boxing rings of Las Vegas, the offices of Germany’s biggest bank, the caves along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was hiding, and the gilded restaurants of Paris, where it also left blood spattered on the streets. It pulled in a playboy demi-celebrity, an Afghan refugee, a flashy street hustler who couldn’t accumulate enough bling, an immaculate businessman who hobnobbed with the queen of England, the doyenne of Marseille’s underground, and a man some people called the Brain.
The Brain’s real name is Grégory Zaoui, and he claims that the entire scam was his idea. Even though the fraud sprouted across Europe, Zaoui insists that he was the only person smart enough to have planted the seed. Daphne, he says, gets far too much credit for his role in ripping off the carbon market.
Zaoui is stout and broad chinned, with thick eyebrows and a sweep of dark hair. When he was involved in the carbon scam, he took pains to remain understated. He favored dress shirts in pale blue or white. Even when he was photographed alongside some of the highest-ranking politicians in France, including a president and a prime minister, his demeanor was almost retreating. When he spent money, he did it quietly; he twice rented out an entire Hermès store in central Paris so his girlfriend could shop in privacy. Journalists described him in terms they would never use for Daphne: discreet, cerebral, analytical. Even though they grew up within miles of each other, Daphne and Zaoui couldn’t be more different.
When Zaoui was hauled in front of police, some 15 years ago now, he said that he’d been betrayed. He went into the business with the wrong person, he claimed, which meant that his scheme was doomed from the start. Someone he’d once considered among his closest friends double-crossed him so wickedly that he never really reaped the rewards he deserved for being a carbon fraudster.
Zaoui agreed to meet me in Paris last May, at a restaurant in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels, the Lutetia, where a Coca-Cola costs 12 euros and an army of valets swarm the entrance. He arrived late wearing sweatpants and a raincoat, and he was in a frazzled state because he’d misplaced his card for the city’s charging stations, which he required to replenish the battery on his electric scooter. When he settled in, he wanted to set the record straight about his and Daphne’s respective roles in Europe’s carbon fraud. Until now, he told me, no one had truly understood the relationship between them. “He is the prince,” Zaoui told me. “But I am the king.”
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