Judd Blevins at a City Council meeting in Enid, Okla.

By Brandy Zadrozny

ENID, Okla. — The photo of Judd Blevins was unmistakable. 

In it, Blevins, bearded and heavyset, held a tiki torch on the University of Virginia campus, on the eve of Unite the Right, a 2017 coming-together of the nation’s neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. 

Connie Vickers had found the photo online along with others showing Blevins marching alongside an angry mob — a crowd of men recorded throughout the night spitting and shouting “Jews will not replace us!” Vickers had it enlarged at a local print and copy shop. On a January night in 2023, she and Nancy Presnall, best friends, retirees and rare Democrats in a deeply red Oklahoma county, brought it to a sparsely attended forum where Blevins, a candidate running to represent Ward 1 on Enid’s six-seat City Council, was making his case.

They had hoped to get a question in while Blevins was on stage, but settled for confronting him after.

Hearts pumping, Presnall and Vickers approached the 41-year-old former Marine. From a kitchen trash bag, Vickers pulled out the blown-up photo of Blevins and asked about his ties to white nationalists. 

As his campaign manager whisked a red-faced Blevins away, Vickers and Presnall followed, yelling, “Answer the question, Judd!” 

“He ran away from two little old ladies,” Presnall recalled. Connie Vickers and Nancy Presnall, best friends and rare Democrats in conservative Enid, confronted Blevins about his white nationalist ties. 

Two weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, Blevins won his race, unseating the Republican incumbent, widely viewed as a devoted public servant, who died from cancer later that year. Voters seemed to appreciate Blevins’ bio: a veteran who’d served in Iraq and who’d worked a manual job in Tulsa before moving back to his hometown to take over his father’s roofing business. Blevins described himself as a man of God and extolled the city as a place where “traditional values” remained the norm. 

The message resounded in Enid, a city nearly 100 miles north of Oklahoma City with just over 50,000 people. In 1980, more than 90% of the area’s residents were white; now less than 3 in 4 are. Enid is both one of the country’s most quickly diversifying places and one of the most conservative, where residents describe the ever-present whirring of jets from nearby Vance Air Force Base as “the sound of freedom.” 

It’s not clear how many voters knew about Blevins’ white nationalist ties. There was an article in the local paper, which Blevins labeled “a hit piece,” but beyond the confrontation with Vickers and Presnall, it just wasn’t talked about. Blevins wasn’t asked about it at campaign events or forums and his opponent never brought it up. 

But a white nationalist campaigning for office is one thing; his election is another. And Blevins’ win didn’t sit well with many in Enid. It marked the beginning of a fight to expel Blevins from the City Council — a fight for the very soul of Enid that would unite a coalition of its most progressive residents, divide its conservatives and show the power of community organizing. 

Over the next year, grandmothers would be branded antifa radicals, local organizers would be accused of attempted murder, and a national white power movement would stake its claim on the City Council. And for a growing number of state and local governments confronting extremism in their ranks, the outcome of that fight — Blevins’ recall election on April 2 — will serve either as a model or a warning.

Enid is known for Vance Air Force Base and its oil and gas production. The City Council is desperate to see it grow.

Blevins has declined multiple interview requests. (In response to questions about his white nationalist ties, he told a reporter, “I hope you find God.”) So when, how and why Blevins got involved with a white supremacist movement may never be known.  

What is clear is that from at least 2017 to 2019, Blevins was an active leader in Identity Evropa, one of the largest among the white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups that collectively made up the alt-right. 

In public, Identity Evropa eschewed the racist label, opting instead for sanitized descriptors like “identitarians” who were focused on “preserving Western culture.” But privately, in secret meetings and internal online chat groups, members were clear about their motivations and beliefs. In posts that praised Nazis, denigrated racial minorities and professed the superiority of white people, pseudonymous Identity Evropa members spoke candidly about their goal of normalizing racist ideologies and infiltrating conservative politics. 

As the group’s Oklahoma state coordinator, Blevins flyered its major cities and universities with his group’s white nationalist propaganda, organized and participated in banner drops over state highways, and recruited, interviewed and accepted new members into the fold. Blevins marched at the tiki torch rally alongside hundreds of men in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 and the next day at Unite the Right, where he carried the original Oklahoma flag. 

Blevins remained active in the group even after the rally ended in violence, with beatings of counterprotesters and the murder of a 32-year-old paralegal and civil rights activist. In a 2018 podcast, Blevins, who went by the online moniker Conway, talked about his passion for recruitment. 

“As we like to say in Identity Evropa, there’s nothing you can do to stop us,” Blevins said.

Most of this was reported by left-wing news outlets three years before Blevins ran for office. 

In March 2019, Unicorn Riot, a progressive media collective that covers social movements, published Identity Evropa’s private chats, which anti-fascist researchers and journalists then used to identify people who planned and attended the Charlottesville rally: police, teachers and members of the military among them. One group matched Conway to Blevins based on photos, biographical details and Conway’s disclosure that he would be marching at Unite the Right with Oklahoma’s original flag. The progressive news outlet Right Wing Watch published an article soon after outing Blevins to a wider audience. NBC News verified this reporting and unearthed more evidence of Blevins’ white supremacist identity, including posts, photos and a podcast appearance. 

After his unmasking, which included antifa activists posting photos of his family and the Tulsa lawn-care business where he worked, Blevins shut down his social media accounts. 

In one of his final messages in the Identity Evropa internal chat, he said he was moving back home, and, in one of his last tweets, he hinted at wider ambitions. 

Under another pseudonym, Blevins posted that “our guys” — meaning fellow white nationalists — should be supported in pursuing local elected office “such as city council.”

“Basically positions where one can fly under the radar yet still be effective,” Blevins posted. Blevins declined to answer a reporter’s questions after a City Council meeting. 

Back in Enid, Blevins kept a low profile, fixing roofs for his dad’s company. In 2022 he announced his candidacy, and it didn’t take long for the local newspaper to get wind of Blevins’ past. 

The Enid News & Eagle doesn’t wade into controversy often — aside from its endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2016, a gut punch to the city’s conservatives that led to a flood of canceled subscriptions. Most stories are of government meetings, high school sports and features about local heroes and businesses. Cindy Allen, a former editor and publisher, and a conservative Republican herself, knew people in Enid would be suspicious of the left-wing outlets that first reported on Blevins, so over five weeks, she and a reporter retraced Right Wing Watch’s steps and then published a front-page exposé. 

It’s unclear how many people in Enid read the article. “Let’s be honest,” Allen said. “The readership of newspapers is a lot lower than it used to be.” 

Blevins declined to be interviewed, but gave the paper a statement alleging that leftists backed by a “George-Soros-funded” media outlet were behind a campaign to brand him a Nazi. 

Around the same time, Connie Vickers was conducting her own investigation. She pored over Blevins’ old posts, collecting the ones where he mentioned Hitler admiringly and joked about wearing a swastika armband. Vickers scoured news footage from Charlottesville for Blevins. She collected screenshots and forwarded them to her friend Nancy Presnall. She made her sign. Armed with that evidence, representing the Garfield County Democrats, Presnall began speaking at City Council meetings. At a meeting in January 2023, a week before the candidates’ forum, she warned about Blevins’ candidacy and support, calling it “an underlying evil that is coming into our town.” 

Blevins won by 36 votes in an election where 808 people, less than 15% of the ward’s 5,600 registered voters, came out — a dismal turnout on par with municipal elections across the country. 

The credit — or the blame — for Blevins’ victory depends on whom you ask. Some say it was name recognition; Blevins shares a last name, but is no relation, to the beloved owners of the only locally operated grocery store, Jumbo Foods. Most credit a local conservative activist who managed his campaign and his supporters from the Enid Freedom Fighters, a Facebook group-turned-political force that warred against mask mandates and then certain library books. Blevins’ campaign materials, which leaned into this hard-right Republican identity, were unprecedented in an Enid City Council election — which had always been nonpartisan. 

Blevins’ win represented the kind of quiet progress white power groups had been preaching. As the alt-right splintered after Charlottesville, leaders urged their members to log off the internet, remove their masks and get involved in the political establishment. 

“The Republican Party is comprised largely of white, aging baby boomers,” white supremacist James Allsup told Identity Evropa conferencegoers in 2018. “As baby boomers age out, the positions they hold will become vacant all throughout society and somebody will have to fill them.”

Most of the avowed white supremacists who ran for office in 2018 lost. Increasingly, though, far-right activists and extremists, including those espousing white supremacist beliefs, are faring better. In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism identified more than 100 right-wing extremists running for office nationwide. Nineteen won. 

The fallout from these local elections has rocked communities from Florida to Idaho. Christian nationalists in Ottawa County, Michigan, pushed outtheir moderate Republican counterparts in 2023 and took over a county board. The same happened with far-right activists the year before in conservative Shasta County, California. 

In Enid, Blevins’ election galvanized an opposition. In March 2023, around 100 people, including Vickers and Presnall, met at a community center. By the end of the evening, they had formed the Enid Social Justice Committee and decided on its first order of business: recalling Judd Blevins. Kristi Balden, chair of the

The group elected a chair and a vice: Kristi Balden, a 58-year-old mother of three, easily spotted in Enid with her pink hair and white cowboy boots, and James Neal, 48, priest of a small inclusive Orthodox Catholic parish and local firebrand known for his flowing garments and embrace of the LGBTQ community.

They created a Facebook page and urged followers to sign an online petition. They launched a website that laid out the evidence against Blevins. They made buttons and T-shirts emblazoned with images of raised fists, and hosted grill-outs, bake sales and protests. 

When former state Sen. Jake Merrick hosted Blevins on his Freedom 96.9 talk radio show in March, he noted Blevins was “under attack.” 

“They would like to see me apologize and denounce everything that I’m accused of, but I don’t have anything to apologize for,” Blevins said. 

On May 1, two-and-a-half months after he was elected, Blevins was sworn in at City Hall. Dozens of Enid Social Justice Committee (ESJC) members gathered outside, holding signs that read, “What happened in Charlottesville, Judd?” and chanted a riff on the hateful Unite the Right cry, “Judd, we will replace you!” 

That would take time. Per Enid law, a city commissioner must serve six months before a recall petition can be filed. In the meantime, the ESJC spoke at nearly every City Council meeting. The last item on the agenda — after prayer, the pledge and a plea from the local animal shelter to adopt a pet in need, after the council addressed the mundane but essential tasks required of local governments, which recently included the reprogramming of traffic lights and a law designating size limits for pet pot-bellied pigs — is public comment. ESJC was such a constant presence that the mayor changed the time allotted for public comment on nonagenda items from three minutes to one. James Neal is known for his embrace of Enid’s LGBTQ community. He calls himself “the weird priest in the dress shouting into the storm.” 

Blevins’ record in the council — apart from the chaos — has been mostly without incident. He’s voted with the rest of the council, and attended veteran’s events at the base and store openings. null

His hard-right posturing has won Blevins supporters who signed up for public comment to counter the “mob of weirdos and miscreants” at the ESJC and compare Blevins to venerated conservative figures like Ronald Reagan. A woman with a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt beseeched the council to look inside their own hearts and ask whether their pasts included anything they “wouldn’t want known.” Another man with a long ginger beard commended Blevins for his courage in attending the Charlottesville rally, which he called a “demonstration to protect American history.” 

Wade Burleson, former president of the Southern Baptists of Oklahoma and a retired pastor of Enid’s largest church, was an early supporter of Blevins on Facebook. Burleson, who also sits on the faith advisory committee of the state’s controversial school Superintendent Ryan Walters, said attempts to unseat Blevins are a “race-bait trap,” an attempt by “communists” and the “mainstream media” to “divide the world over race.” 

From the office of his new ministry, an old Pizza Hut remodeled by his wife, Burleson explained that Blevins’ time with white nationalism was a response to his service in the Marines and a reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement.

“He made some mistakes,” Burleson said, “but he’s not a racist.”  Wade Burleson supports Blevins, calling the effort to unseat him a “race-bait trap.” 

By the fall, organizers with the Enid Social Justice Committee were knocking on doors in Ward 1, collecting signatures. But committee members agreed they would forgo a recall if Blevins acknowledged his white nationalist activities and associations, renounce them and apologize. Blevins refused. 

Behind closed doors, Enid Mayor David Mason said Blevins was more forthcoming. 

“He admitted it,” said Mason, an insurance executive who was elected the same time as Blevins. Mason has a way of wearing his exasperation on his face during heated council meetings: he whips off his glasses, breathes in deeply and leans back in his swivel chair. He’s concerned about what Blevins’ ties with hate groups will do for business in a city he’s desperate to grow. “Every time you Google Enid, Oklahoma, that’s what comes up,” Mason said. Mayor David Mason thinks Enid voters didn’t know the extent of Blevins’ white nationalist activities when they elected him: “I think we try to see the good in people.

In a private meeting in November with Blevins, the city manager and the city attorney, Mason asked: “Was that you in Charlottesville? Is that you in those photographs? Did you write all those hateful text messages?” 

“Yes,” Blevins said, according to Mason and the city attorney. 

“Are you still involved with those groups?” Mason asked.

“I don’t have to answer that question,” Blevins replied. 

“My thought,” Mason remembers, was, “You just did.”

Mason couldn’t remove Blevins, but he wanted to do something, so he wrote a measure for the next meeting’s agenda: a censure that would announce the loss of confidence in Blevins and formally repudiate white nationalism. 

Meanwhile, Blevins and his supporters went on the offense. 

On Nov. 12, Blevins walked into the Enid Police Department and filed a report. The brake line on his silver pickup had been cut, he said, and he offered as suspects two members of the Enid Social Justice Committee, who have denied involvement. He typed up an account of his claims on city letterhead, blaming the attack on “far left wing fringe groups.” 

He went back on Jake Merrick’s radio show, where he asked the audience to pray for him and the Enid police as they investigated. Merrick described it as an “attempted murder,” a characterization that Blevins repeated at a future council meeting, in a critique of the media for its lack of coverage: “I guess attempted murder of an elected official isn’t newsworthy!” 

Outside of Enid, news of the upcoming censure vote and the alleged attempt on Blevins’ life attracted the attention of Blevins’ other allies: national white supremacist groups. 

Jason Kessler, a neo-Nazi and organizer of the Charlottesville rally, and Jared Taylor, a self-described “white advocate” who edits the racist website American Renaissance, came out in support of Blevins. Taylor posted a video praising Blevins as “the perfect man for the job.” 

Leaders of the American Freedom Party, a white power group formed by skinheads in Southern California, had been following events in Enid closely. Back when Blevins won, the group celebrated, posting to their Telegram channels that Enid showed the political appetite for white supremacist messaging. (“Join us to run for office under a pro-White banner today!”) Now that Blevins was under threat of censure, the American Freedom Party urged its members to write to the other City Council members asking them to vote no. 

One neo-Nazi blogger called the community organizers with ESJC “outrageous antifa commandos.”

The blogger wrote: “Doesn’t it feel like this could and should be used to springboard our guys into a permanent takeover of Enid, Oklahoma?” The Enid Social Justice Committee formed in response to Blevins’ election; now they’re advocating for other progressive changes.

The chamber was packed with members of the ESJC and Blevins supporters for the Nov. 21 meeting where the motion to censure Blevins would be decided. Mason, the mayor, was sure he had the votes. 

And then Derwin Norwood spoke. Norwood, the owner of a concrete business, a registered Republican and the council’s only Black member, took the floor for eight minutes. In a fiery speech that sounded at times like a sermon, Norwood told of his own experiences with racism and quoted scripture.  

“We need to stop this foolishness, stop fighting, stop bickering,” Norwood said.

And then, although Blevins hadn’t directly asked for his forgiveness, Norwood was moved by the Holy Spirit to offer it. He remembers it like an out-of-body experience. 

“Stand up,” Norwood told Blevins. “Do you love me?”  

“Yes I do, as a brother in Christ,” Blevins replied. 

“l forgive you,” Norwood said, and the men embraced to applause and groans. Commissioner Derwin Norwood’s voice on racism carried weight in the City Council. He doesn’t regret forgiving Blevins. 

With that, the votes were gone. The council voted unanimously to table the matter until after the recall election.

No one — not the mayor or Blevins or the ESJC or Norwood himself — had expected the display, photos of which led news coverage and white nationalist websites alike. Norwood knows his voice carries extra weight when the topic is racism, and he knows that his forgiveness, and that hug, might have given cover to Blevins, but he didn’t see any other way.

“A lot of people were mad at me,” Norwood said, sitting in the lobby of Enid’s new, but empty, downtown hotel. “But I’m proud of what I did. I was the example of righteousness.”

Besides, he continued, “Now no one can say that we influenced the election.”

The ESJC collected more than enough signatures and filed its petition to recall Blevins. There was still one hiccup: finding someone to replace him. They discussed supporting a progressive Democrat, but this was no time for delusions — Blevins was already sending out campaign mailers featuring pro-LGBTQ Facebook posts from Balden and Neal, the chair and vice chair, as evidence that any candidate who tried to unseat him would be a tool of the ESJC. At a  City Council meeting in December, Blevins pointed his finger toward Balden and offered a warning. 

“I want anybody who’s thinking about filing to understand this. You will be the social justice squad’s candidate,” he said. “You will have to campaign as this candidate in a ward that went for Donald Trump by 80%. So good luck with that.”

In January, Cheryl Patterson, 61, entered the race, a move she told friends was a result of “temporary insanity.” In announcing her campaign, the grandmother, church youth leader, former teacher and longtime Republican asked supporters not to speak negatively about Blevins. “I hope the focus will be on what each candidate has to offer & the positive things happening in Enid!” she wrote on Facebook. In interviews and at fundraisers, Patterson has repeated what’s become her unofficial campaign motto, reminiscent of Warren G. Harding’s 1920 slogan.

“We need civility,” Patterson told the News & Eagle. “Just normalcy.”

Neither Patterson nor her campaign manager responded to interview requests. People close to her said better to keep away from national news. Even offering a comment could be spun by Blevins and his supporters as collusion.

Signs for both Patterson and Blevins dot the lawns of Ward 1. Most people don’t show up to City Council meetings and haven’t been following the Blevins saga. There’s no polling in Enid, but in talking to people, those who plan to vote next month are split on who should win.

Enid Police never announced the results of the investigation into Blevins’ attempted murder claims. But in December, a month after it was opened, the police closed Blevins’ case. Members of the Enid Social Justice Committee were never interviewed. In his final report, obtained through an open records request, the investigating detective wrote that a review of hours of surveillance footage of Blevins’ truck around town showed no evidence of a crime. “The only person around the vehicle at any of the places is Judd,” the report said.

Members of the ESJC said they are aware — if not downright afraid — that Blevins’ allegations put them on the radar of Nazi groups. They’re careful about their meetings now, keeping the location secret until the last minute. On one evening this month, a few dozen members met at Jezebel’s, a tea house and event space with witchy goods like crystals and tarot cards for sale. They talked about what’s next, after they complete the mission that brought them together: a memorial plaque for a local civil rights leader, a scarf drive for Enid’s unhoused and assembling kits for people released from the Garfield County jail.

In the meantime, Balden reminded the group not to campaign for Patterson, to steer clear of Blevins’ accusations that they’re behind her run.

But they’re all holding their breath. Mayor Mason is, too.

“Hate has no place in Enid,” Mason said. “And if he were to win again, I think there will be another recall. I think it will continue until someone will beat him. We’re just not going to — that’s not us. That is not who the people of Enid are.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

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Britt Tells Misleading Border Story in State of the Union Response

The Alabama senator used a story about sex trafficking to criticize the Biden administration’s border policies. But the events occurred in Mexico years ago.

By Ken Bensinger

The opposition party’s response to the State of the Union address is a golden opportunity for up-and-coming and lesser-known politicians to introduce themselves to the nation and boost their political profile.

Such was the case for Katie Britt, a first-term Republican senator from Alabama who, despite being a newcomer to the national stage, has been mentioned as a possible choice to be Donald J. Trump’s running mate. But her big debut on Thursday night has been marred by intense scrutiny of an anecdote at the center of her speech, which was delivered from her kitchen in Montgomery, Ala.

The story, about a Mexican who was a victim of sex trafficking at the age of 12, came in the context of an attack on President Biden’s border policies. In impassioned tones, Ms. Britt described a girl being raped multiple times a day in dire conditions at the hands of cartels before she was able to escape.

“This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it,” Ms. Britt said. “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

As a rhetorical device, it would be hard conjure up a more powerful and resonant example. But the story was highly misleading and improperly contextualized.

The woman referenced by Ms. Britt was, in fact, never trafficked across the border, nor has she sought asylum in this country. And her harrowing experience took place between 2004 and 2008, while a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the White House and President Biden was still a senator.

In other words, it had nothing at all to do with the current administration’s border policy. But that didn’t stop Ms. Britt from inflaming public fears about immigration and placing blame at Mr. Biden’s feet.

“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis,” she said. “He invited it.”

Although Ms. Britt did not name the victim in her speech, she has previously shared the story of a woman who appears to be the same individual based on congressional testimony,news releases and news reports.

That woman, Karla Jacinto Romero, is a Mexican citizen who does not live in the United States and who has spoken frequently about her experiences of being forced into sexual slavery for four years. In 2023, Ms. Jacinto participated in an event in Texas near the border with Mexico that was also attended by three senators, including Ms. Britt. In a videoreleased shortly after that trip, Ms. Britt discussed Ms. Jacinto’s experiences.

Ms. Jacinto, who spoke with the Times Saturday from Mexico, said she had not been informed ahead of time that Ms. Britt would be discussing her in the speech and only learned about it after a video pointing out the deceptive framing of the senator’s speech was posted by the independent journalist Jonathan Katz on TikTok on Friday.

“I only found out via social media,” said Ms. Jacinto, who continues to speak frequently about human trafficking and who is supported by a U.S.-based nonprofit, Reintegra, that provides educational grants to victims of sex trafficking in Latin America. “I thought it was very strange.”

She said she preferred to keep politics out of the question of human trafficking. “I am involved in the fight to stop trafficking and I don’t think it should be political,” she said. “The work I do is not a game.”

A spokesman for Ms. Britt, Sean Ross, stood behind her speech.

“The story Senator Britt told was 100 percent correct,” he said in a statement. “And there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now. The Biden administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the president falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border.”

Mr. Ross did not respond to a follow-up question about what direct responsibility the Biden administration had for what Ms. Jacinto experienced or what an anecdote about sex trafficking entirely within another country had to do with U.S. border policies.

Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement that Ms. Britt’s remarks were “debunked lies.”

This is not the first time that Ms. Jacinto’s experience has been used as a political bludgeon.

The January 2023 event, held in Eagle Pass, Texas, was organized by Marsha Blackburn, the Republican senator from Tennessee, who framed it as a mission to “examine the disastrous effects of Biden’s border crisis firsthand.”

At the event, Ms. Jacinto was accompanied by a former Mexican congresswoman, Rosi Orozco, who is active in human trafficking matters and lives in the U.S. The two women sat on a round table panel focused on human and sex trafficking and were featured in a short video with the three senators.

Soon thereafter, Ms. Blackburn published an op-ed headlined “Biden’s open border is not compassionate or humane.” After describing Ms. Jacinto’s travails, she wrote: “It is clear that we are experiencing a humanitarian and national security crisis, courtesy of President Biden.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Ms. Blackburn said that “for years, Senator Blackburn has fought to prevent sex trafficking and has met with victims, such as Karla, to hear about the horrific abuses that occur.” The statement added that “countless women and children are sexually trafficked into the U.S.A. due to Biden’s open border agenda. Under President Biden, human trafficking has skyrocketed from a $500 million business in 2018 to around $13 billion a year in 2022.”

Andy McCullough, the executive director of Reintegra, which first helped Ms. Jacinto in 2017, providing funding so she could finish high school, said he was stunned to learn how Ms. Jacinto was portrayed at the Texas event and, again this week, in Ms. Britt’s speech.

“They presented Karla as someone who was trafficked across the border, and that’s not her story,” he said. “This issue is so horrific, and yet the narrative is being manipulated to make it a political thing. This is re-exploiting the very victims of exploitation that we are trying to help.”

Ms. Jacinto, 31, has been speaking against human trafficking for years. In 2015, she met Pope Francis at the Vatican and also spoke at a House foreign affairs subcommittee on global sex trafficking organized by Republican Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey. The hearing focused on strategies for combating the problem in other countries, rather than describing them as a product of U.S. border policies.

Concerned about how her story was being portrayed by politicians, Mr. McCullough brought Ms. Jacinto on as staffer at Reintegra last March, hoping that the organization could protect her and her message, paying her a small stipend and arranging for speaking opportunities.

“This issue is horrendous,” Mr. McCullough said. “If we make it a political thing or a religious thing, we take away the reality of how awful it is. All of humanity should be fighting this issue.”

Ken Bensinger covers right wing media and national political campaigns for The Times. More about Ken Bensinger

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The land that once housed Champlain Towers South at 8777 Collins Avenue is pictured June 3, 2022. The condo tower partially collapsed on June 24, 2021, killing 98 people.

Pool deck still likely origin of Surfside condo collapse, federal investigators say, by AARON LEIBOWITZ

ALEIBOWITZ@MIAMIHERALD.COM

A federal probe into the June 2021 collapse of a Surfside condo tower that left 98 people dead continues to point to the building’s pool deck as the most likely initiation point of the collapse, investigators said Thursday at a meeting in Maryland.

In their first public update since last fall on a years-long effort to determine what caused the tragedy, investigators for the National Institute of Standards and Technology presented a detailed look at how they are analyzing video footage and eyewitness interviews to inch closer to a conclusion.

Investigators said there is “strong evidence” that the collapse began in the pool deck of the 12-story, L-shaped Champlain Towers South building, though they have not yet ruled out an initial failure point “in some part of the tower” that could have led to the collapse of the pool deck.

“We have very, we think, conclusive evidence now that the pool deck collapsed before the tower,” said Glenn Bell, team associate leader for the investigation. “What we are still analyzing is what the initiating events were.”

Nearly $30 million has been spent on the probe since it began in 2021, investigators said Thursday. In addition to testing materials from the collapse site and building complex computer models, investigators have been interviewing survivors and other eyewitnesses with help from a team at Florida International University. 

They have also been analyzing several videos to better understand the collapse sequence, including a video taken by a tourist the night of the collapse that showed water gushing into the garage and chunks of concrete covering the floor on the north side of the building. 

Investigators said they worked with the FBI to enhance the video, which helps prove that the pool deck collapsed into the parking garage before the east portion of the tower collapsed.

A draft report of the investigation is still more than a year away, anticipated in May 2025. A final report is expected in September 2025 and will have implications for millions of high-rise dwellers around the world, with recommendations on changes to building codes and construction practices that could prevent a similar catastrophe from happening elsewhere.

We want our investigation of this failure to have lasting impact,” said Judith Mitrani-Reiser, the lead investigator on the NIST investigation and a Miami native. “We want it to save lives, and we want it to ensure this never happens again.”

The findings so far echo a Miami Herald investigation, which found that the pool deck collapsed several minutes before half of the tower fell. In consultation with structural engineers, the Herald identified major weaknesses in the structure and other problems that compounded in the weeks before the collapse. Those included areas where the pool deck appeared to be sagging dangerously, cracking a nearby planter.

Investigators said that among the “most probable” initiation points were failures in slab-column connections in the pool deck that caused the slab around the columns to drop. “Knocking noises” heard by some residents before the collapse bolster the notion that steel reinforcements had fractured at those connection points.

In a presentation last June, investigators said the 40-year-old building’s pool deck had “critically low margins against failure” because of pervasive weaknesses in the structural design that were exacerbated by misplacement and corrosion of the reinforcing steel within the deck, as well as the addition of planters and heavy pavers that were not accounted for in the original designs.

While the team of dozens of engineers and other experts is considering about two dozen failure hypotheses, it is seeking to rule out possibilities that appear less likely.

That includes underground factors like a sinkhole in the limestone underneath the tower or uneven settlement of the building’s foundation. Investigators said Thursday there is “very low probability” that those factors contributed to the collapse.

The probe has found no evidence of an explosion or other extraordinary event that could have triggered the incident.

READ MORE: Pool deck at doomed Surfside tower had ‘critically low margins against failure,’ probe finds

Investigators have yet to elaborate on how the pool deck collapse would have caused the tower to fall minutes later. But computer simulations performed by researchers at the University of Washington in collaboration with the Herald showed that when the deck fell and disconnected from a perimeter wall at the south end of the pool, damage would have spread into the tower along the ground floor near the gym at the center of the L-shaped structure. 

Experts who consulted on the Herald’s forensic investigation said the preliminary deck collapse would have strained the columns along half of the tower’s perimeter, causing them to fracture and ultimately collapse inward along with the majority of the tower

Hitchhiking With Alice Cooper

MARCH 4, 2024 ISSUE

204 COPPER CLASSICS: TRUE-LIFE ROCK TALES← 

Written by Ken Sander

It was late 1968 when my friend, the late Barry Byrens, said to me, “Linc,” (he loved calling me that, because I looked like Linc in the TV show The Mod Squad), “you need to get rid of that motorcycle and get a car, a convertible.” At the time I was subletting a cabin in Laurel Canyon and in fact had not thought about a car. I liked my motorcycle, but it was winter in LA and riding the bike at night was chilly.

Two days later I was at his house in West Hollywood up in the hills at 8929 St. Ives, just above Gil Turner’s liquor store at Doheny and Sunset Blvd. Barry had the newspaper open and said, “I found you a car at this car lot on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood.” He drove me down there in his Lincoln, a hardtop convertible.

We got there and it was a 1964 copper-colored Chevy Corvair convertible. Barry, me, and the salesman took it for a test drive. On a side street south of Sunset I tried to turn the car around and stalled it. It had a stick shift, so I pushed in the clutch and brake. I turned the key to restart it and the Corvair rolled backwards a foot or so and hit a fire hydrant. I don’t think I pressed the brake hard enough. Getting out, we saw a small ding put in the trunk just above the license plate. I was horrified at what I had done, but the salesman said “no sweat” and we continued the test drive, then left.

Two days later Barry found another Corvair convertible but this one was a light blue 1966. We went down and after the test drive, I was sold. It was $999. I plunked down $250 down and the payments would be $48 a month. I drove it back to Barry’s house. Later that day the salesman from the first car lot called and said, “your car is ready to be picked up.” I looked at Barry (I did not know what to say) and he took the phone from me. Barry said, “he doesn’t want the car!” “Why not?” the salesman asked. “He just doesn’t want it,” and then the salesman started getting pushy. Finally, after a back-and-forth Barry says, “he doesn’t want it because it has a dent in the trunk!” The salesman was speechless, and Barry told him to fu*k off and hung up.

My best new toy ever, it is my first car, and driving with the top down is a beautiful thing. Barry was right. One night I am driving up Doheny Drive going to Barry’s house to hang out and I see a hitchhiker. He has long hair and looks like one of us, so I pull over and pick him up. He introduces himself as “Alice Cooper.” Interesting, I think to myself; there must be a story here. “Unusual name,” I say to Alice, and he explains that it is his stage persona and the name of his band. “This is not a sexual identity thing either,” he quickly adds. He goes on to explain that he had recently formed the band and they were in rehearsal here in Hollywood.

I tell him I am from New York City and he says he is from Phoenix. I say that is not far from Los Angeles, and Alice answers that in fact it is very far from LA We both have a laugh at that one. They are getting ready for their debut. I had met more than a few musicians in Los Angeles who had told me that they were forming a band and rehearsing – and never heard of them again. But I got the feeling that this Alice Cooper guy was more realistic and solid, so I thought it might happen with for him. We got to Alice’s destination and he asked me to stop and drop him off.

Alice Cooper. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Hunter Desportes.

I loved this Hollywood life; so friendly with everyone just hanging out. Whenever I had no plans for the evening, I would go to Ben Frank’s on Sunset to hang out. the parking lot was always packed with girls and long-haired guys, a couple of hundred young folks just milling around and getting to know each other. In New York we had something similar to that at the Bethesda fountain in Central Park, where the hippies, freaks and musicians would hang out, but the scene would only be happening on Sunday afternoons.

One night I am at Ben Frank’s with Jon Lane, my (late) friend from New York City who was visiting me, and these two girls I had seen around came up to us and asked if we wanted to go party with them. Tempting, but we were hungry and were planning to go inside to Ben Frank’s and have dinner, so we passed. A couple of nights later we were back in the parking lot and this kid I kind of knew came over to us and said, “you know Audrey and her friend, right?” The guy tells me they had died. What? Yeah, he says, they overdosed on heroin; the police found them. Jonny turned to me and said, “that could have been us.” Even though we didn’t do smack, they might have convinced us to try it.

That, I was beginning to find out, was the other side of Hollywood life. As open and friendly as things were, there was another side that was dangerous, with quick turns and sudden deaths. All kinds of different people come to Southern California. New York City is the melting pot of the world, and Los Angeles is the melting pot for young Americans.

Maybe a couple of weeks or so later I see Alice Cooper hitching again. He jumps in my car and I told him I was going to a friend’s house to hang out and if he wanted, he could come too. It wouldn’t quite be a party but there would be people there listening to music and most would be smoking. Alice says, “I don’t smoke pot.” I replied, “really?” He answered, “I don’t have a problem with it but I personally do not like it.” “Oh, so what do you do? “I love beer, Budweiser in fact.” I am not sure if they will have beer and Alice says, “let’s stop somewhere so I can pick up some Bud.”

I think we stopped at Gil Turner’s and he ran in and bought a six pack of Bud. Then we drove to my friend’s house and joined the scene. That was the thing about LA – you could just drop in on anyone you knew, and it was okay. You would show up they would invite you in and ask if you wanted to smoke.

After about a half an hour I look over and see Alice on the floor sitting with his back leaning against the wall and drinking a can of beer. He had two empties on the floor and was working on his third. No one was drinking with him; it was a pot crowd, but he looked comfortable, fit in and seemed like he was enjoying himself. The evening went on and after a couple of hours I left with a girl and we went to my cabin in Laurel Canyon.

One afternoon the rock group Love showed up to the cabin and we all hung out and partied. Love, led by the brilliant but eccentric Arthur Lee, were one of the leading bands on the LA scene during the mid to late 1960s. However, Arthur Lee wasn’t with them when they showed up. I asked about it and the band said that they had parted ways. The often-unruly Lee was quick to fire musicians.

I have been told that Roger Daltrey said that Arthur Lee was on the spectrum. In their earlier days, the members of Love lived in a decrepit Hollywood mansion once owned by Bela Lugosi. Arthur Lee and Love evolved from the group formerly known as Grass Roots (not the Grass Roots that had many hit singles) and were known in LA for their spirited and entertaining live performances. Arthur was immensely proud of his racially-mixed band, one of the first in rock and roll. In late 1966 the three hottest bands in Los Angeles were The Byrds, The Doors and Love.

Love’s Forever Changes was released in 1967 and was and still is considered a masterpiece. The name of the album comes from a story Arthur had heard. This guy had broken up with his girlfriend. She exclaimed, “You said you would love me forever!” and the guy replied, “Well, forever changes.” The album was brilliant but did not sell as well as expected. Arthur, being very volatile, changed band personnel frequently. (In 1995 he was wrongfully convicted of a gun charge and, being his third strike, his career was interrupted by a prison sentence until 2001. After prison, Arthur formed a new band and toured and made some records. However, even though he was much more disciplined, he never again achieved his earlier promise. Sadly, he passed away from leukemia in 2006 at the age of 61.)

Some weeks later I am driving my Corvair with the top down and see Alice Cooper walking up on Sunset. I yelled to him asking if he needed a ride. With a friendly wave he said no and kept on walking east towards the Old World restaurant. The next time I saw Alice was when I was in Chicago on tour with Nektar in 1974. By this time he had become a huge star with songs like “I’m Eighteen” and “School’s Out.” We said a quick hello to each other in the lobby of the upscale Chicago Holiday Inn on Lake Shore Drive.

In 1994 I was an on-air technology correspondent and host for The Cable Doctor Show, and was covering the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I saw that Alice Cooper was making a celebrity appearance. “Meet Alice Cooper and his Mother.” An unusual scenario, but there he was in an exhibitor’s booth, posing for Polaroid pictures with his mother. I went over and he introduced me to his mom and said, “you look different with short hair! And what is with the jacket and tie?” In response I told him I was a technology journalist on television, but that he looked exactly the same, and as you can see, that made him smile. That smile reminded me of when I first met him. He certainly has come a long way for a kid named Vince from Phoenix. I think this is pretty much the way he planned it.

I found out during my interview with Lucia Giudice of Puccio Fine Art, for my Art Lovers Forum podcast, that many New York galleries are leaving their ground floor spaces for less expensive showrooms on upper floors in office buildings and by appointment only. Many of the galleries are doing most of their sales online and through art fairs. Lucia revealed lots of other surprises.

Art Lovers Forum Episode 7

Lucia Giudice is the founder of New York City based Puccio Fine Art. She is also a dear friend of mine. We lived in the same upper East side coop for many years and she was the first gallerist I became close to. I used to visit her gallery on East 63rd all the time. Now she sells exclusively online.

She has an educational background in Political Science and Art History, and several decade’s worth of experience in the art world. Most importantly as the daughter of Italian Immigrants and niece of sculptor Paul Puccio; she has always been involved with art, artists, galleries, art shows, foundries, studios and workshops. Puccio Fine Art was established in 2003 out of a love for art collecting and need for space to showcase works. Her focus is in the secondary market, by masters such as Warhol, Picasso, Dali, Lichtenstein, Stella, Rosenquist and Matisse. She has been a member of the International Fine Art Appraisers, the Association of Women Art Dealers and previously served on the Board of the Italian Welfare League.

Listen to episode 7 of the Art Lovers Forum podcast here – https://www.artloversforum.com/e/episode-7-lucia-giudice-puccio-fine-art/

The Art Lovers Forum Podcast is also available on popular podcast sites:

Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/art-lovers-forum-podcast/id1725034621

Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/5FkkeWv83Hs4ADm13ctTZi

Amazon Music – https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/77484212-60c5-4026-a96f-bd2d4ae955c6

Audible – https://www.audible.com/pd/Art-Lovers-Forum-Podcast-Podcast/B0CRR1XYLZ

iHeartRadio – https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1323-art-lovers-forum-podcast-141592278/

The sole survivor of Manhattan’s big three media-power-lunch spots.

NOSTALGIA ON THE MENU

Power-Lunch Like It’s 1989!

Michael’s is a restaurant frozen in time. A better time, for its aging, loyal (and forgiving) regulars

BY  DANA BROWN

Progress requires sacrifice. As a result, the forward march of technological innovation has left many casualties: landlines, video stores, paper maps, civil discourse, facts. Words and phrases have become acronyms, and emojis have replaced emotions. Doing something “in real life” has become such a novelty, a remarkable event, that we had to create an acronym for it. WTF?

Then along came the coronavirus. Suddenly, it became almost impossible to do anything IRL. The pandemic is now over (I think). But in just a few years it killed almost three million people worldwide. It also killed a number of social constructs and customs. One of those things is the power lunch.

The art at Michael’s includes pieces by Jasper Johns, David Hockney, and Frank Stella. 

“Power lunch” was first coined by an editor at Esquire in 1979, when magazines had the ability to create Zeitgeist-defining phrases. It was used to describe the lunchtime scene at the Four Seasons in the Seagram Building, in Midtown Manhattan. Four years earlier Esquire had run Truman Capote’s “La Côte Basque 1965,” a short story about what would soon be called a power lunch that would later figure prominently in Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.

And while the term may have been coined in New York, about a New York restaurant, there is, or perhaps was, a power lunch in almost every city or town around the world for as long as there have been powerful people with a midday appetite.

The power lunch was never about eating, though; it was about being seen, staying relevant, holding on to or building on whatever kind of power or influence you have, or think you have, whether that’s financial, political, social, or cultural. It was about business, optics, gossip, social standing. It was about having a literal and metaphorical “seat at the table.”

But the media power lunch always towered over the rest. The crowd had better clothes, bigger personalities, a higher tolerance for alcohol, more creative and interesting work, and a higher proportion of women, balancing out the gender makeup of the dining room. Every big media center had a media power lunch, but nobody did it quite like New York, the media center of the universe.

In the middle of the day, especially in the late 1980s and 1990s, when business was booming, the media elite ditched their desks en masse, with the precision and predictability of the Flintstones’ opening sequence, got into their idling Lincoln Town Cars, and were driven three or four blocks to a few specific restaurants to power-lunch, which might as well have been a verb during this era.

The power lunch was never about eating. It was about having a literal and metaphorical “seat at the table.”

There were really only three options, all located in Midtown: the Four Seasons, Philip Johnson’s midcentury masterpiece; the Royalton hotel’s flashier 44, whimsically designed by Philippe Starck and run by the well-connected English restaurateur Brian McNally; and Michael’s, the least flamboyant of the three, tucked under a nondescript apartment building on West 55th Street.

The media power lunch was fading well before the pandemic, as takeout and delivery options improved and the working lunch took hold, while the media business became more dispersed. The Internet and the Great Recession led to a contraction in legacy-media-advertising spending. Expense accounts began to wither and die, and the business has been on a downward trajectory ever since. In 2023, more than 20,000 American media jobs disappeared. This year may be even worse.

A Few Hokas, but Zero Yeezys

Michael’s, the sole survivor of the big three media-power-lunch spots, is a restaurant frozen in time. That can be a selling point, as was the case with the magnificent Four Seasons, but not if that time happens to be 1989, when Michael’s was opened by the California restaurateur Michael McCarty. (The original Michael’s is in Santa Monica.) And there is still more than a fragrant whiff of the 80s here: the wall-to-wall carpeting, the dusty track lighting, the mirrored column in the center of the dining room, the worn Breuer chairs.

What’s not frozen in time, which is unfortunate for a restaurant that relies on media expense accounts, is the media industry. So I was surprised that Michael’s began filling up at around 12:30 P.M. on a cold Thursday in February. One after another, parties of two and four were led to their tables, mostly older gentlemen in suits with open-collared shirts, like it’s 1998 and “business casual” still means simply losing the tie. Although most of them had replaced their wing tips or loafers with sneakers. I saw a few pairs of Skechers, a few Hokas. By one P.M., the place was packed. It was like the dinner rush for the early-bird special in an assisted-living community.

For years, the New York Post’s media columnist Keith Kelly would often detail the boldfaced power lunchers at Michael’s in his “Media Ink” column, sometimes even including a seating chart. Kelly retired in 2021, so the restaurant now tweets a daily list of their boldfaced lunch guests (#INTHEHOUSE) to their 2,800 followers.

Scrolling back, there were repeat visits by familiar faces, such as P.R. veteran Peggy Siegal, adman turned Joe Scarborough sidekick Donny Deutsch, gadfly Michael Wolff, former Time Inc. head Norm Pearlstine, and literary agent Lynn Nesbit. Tina Brown, Jeff Zucker, Michael Kors, David Axelrod, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Scaramucci, and Rex Reed have all made recent appearances at Michael’s, too. The only semi-notable person I recognized when I went—and it took me a minute to place her—was former Vogue staffer and Melania Trump memoirist Stephanie Winston Wolkoff.

Time hasn’t been kind to the quality of Michael’s food. It ranges from just O.K. to not very good to whoa. In fact, the less said about the food, the better. I know, the power lunch isn’t about the food, but at these prices, it needs to be improved. A piece of salmon is $44; an eight-ounce filet mignon, $58. The burger ($38), the Cobb salad ($35), and the Niçoise ($36), while all pricey, are probably the safest bets on the menu.

My $40 branzino consisted of two limp fillets that were so thin the fish must have been on Ozempic. A $16 side dish of gray, gloppy mushrooms tasted like it was straight from a can. A number of plates had that unmistakable look of food that had been sitting under a heat lamp for 20 minutes—its garnishes wilted and depressed, looking sadder than photographs of 1970s England—and yet the dishes arrived so quickly it’s impossible they had been. I’m afraid that when it comes to the food, Michael’s has simply stopped trying. Which is a shame, because I remember it being better than this.

And yet there’s something nostalgically charming about the place. The room is comfortable and bright, lined with some really wonderful art, including pieces by Jasper Johns, David Hockney, and Frank Stella. The tables are spaced a reasonable distance apart. There was a communal understanding that we should use our inside voices. There were no tables of young people living their truth, or their best life, or some combination of those two empty promises, which seems to include being exceedingly loud in restaurants.

At Michael’s, you can have a conversation without having to lean in to hear what your dining partner is saying, and there are fewer and fewer restaurants I can say that about. Even the Kenny G–style smooth jazz playing quietly was refreshing. In an increasingly chaotic and fraught world, for almost $200 with the tip and a little more than an hour of my day,

Michael’s brought me back to a better time, a simpler time. It gave me some comfort about my own mortality, and made me feel, however fleetingly, that maybe, just maybe, everything was going to be O.K. You can’t really put a price on that.

Sure, its lunchtime crowd resembles a casting call for a reboot of Cocoon. But no one was wearing Yeezys or Lululemon. There were no influencers or reality-television “stars.” No one was staring at their phone. No one was taking pictures of their food. People were simply talking to each other—the ultimate throwback. 

At Michael’s, it’s the diners who are offered a sense of agency and purpose in a world that has left them behind. For an hour or two, they can make believe it’s still the waning days of the 20th century, the media business is thriving, and the future looks bright. It’s a wonderfully empathetic and humanistic concept, playing out every day over lunch at Michael’s, IRL.

Dana Brown is a Columnist at AIR MAIL. A former deputy editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author of the memoir Dilettante: True Tales of Excess, Triumph, and Disaster

The Art Detective

Jeff Koons’s Art Is on the Moon, but His Prices Have Cratered. Can Power Players Reignite His Market?

Major shows will soon hit Hong Kong, New York, and London. Will a collector pay more than $50 million for his sculpture of Michael Jackson and Bubbles?

by Katya Kazakina

Underestimate Jeff Koons at your own peril.

The artist’s soaring ambition shows no sign of abating, market doldrums be damned. In the past year alone, Koons has taken on the moon, where his sculptures just landed after a weeklong journey—and the sun (more on that later).

Here on Earth, some of the 69-year-old artist’s biggest champions are working hard to reverse the recent downward trajectory in his prices.

The stakes are high. Koons’s auction totals have plummeted since his gleaming steel Rabbit (1986) fetched $91 million in 2019, making him the most expensive living artist in the world, the crown he still holds. Last year was particularly bad: Sales fell to just $27.8 million, down 84 percent from the peak of $170.8 million in 2014, according to the Artnet Price Database.

Almost 40 percent of the 292 Koons lots offered failed to find buyers. He ranked 72nd on a list of artists’ annual auction revenue, down from 55th in 2022—itself a demotion from 2019, when he was 15th, according to Artnet data.

Such ebb-and-flow is not new for Koons. At various points in his long career, he has been the world’s most famous artist and the comeback kid. Right now he appears to be both at the same time. And so this spring, several powerful secondary market players are mounting Koons exhibitions in New York, London, and Hong Kong to remind everyone of his greatness.

© 2024 Artnet Worldwide Corporation

They believe that his market will bounce back, realigning itself once again with his art historical significance.

“There’s no question about it,” said Dakis Joannou, who’s been collecting Koons for almost 40 years, becoming a close friend along the way.

Several significant works that the Greek collector originally acquired are now heading to Hong Kong for “Jeff Koons: 1979–1999” at Art Intelligence Global (AIG), the advisory firm co-founded by Amy Cappellazzo and Yuki Terase. The exhibition unites a dozen pieces from Koons’s early series, including the “Inflatables,” “Equilibrium,” and “Made in Heaven.” Most will be appearing in Asia for the first time, according to AIG. One work, Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), has an asking price in excess of $50 million. The exhibition will open on March 23 alongside Art Basel Hong Kong.

Jeff Koons with his porcelain sculpture of Michael Jackson in a SoHo freight elevator, 1989 ©️ Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos

“Jeff Koons is one of the most well-known names in Asia, and yet he’s never really had a proper survey there, especially of the early works,” Terase said in an interview. “We are doing something very meaningful because a lot of people have only seen the works on social media and the internet, but never in person.”

In London, Skarstedt gallery will display five mural-size canvases in “Jeff Koons: Paintings, 2001–2013.” Opening March 1, the show will arrive in time for the marquee London auctions of Impressionist, modern, and contemporary art. It will include works from the “Easyfun-Ethereal” series, which started with seven paintings commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2000. (None of the Guggenheim’s paintings are in the show, the gallery confirmed. But two other pieces from the series are included, having recently come to auction, with Hot Dog, 2002, fetching $1.9 million in November and Pancakes, 2001, selling for $867,000 in 2021.)

Then, New York’s Mnuchin Gallery will revisit its watershed 2004 exhibition, “Jeff Koons: Highlights of 25 Years,” which included many of his greatest hits, including Michael Jackson and Bubbles. The show began a new chapter for the artist, following a painful decade marked by the end of his first marriage in a bitter divorce and his near-bankruptcy while creating the “Celebration” series.

“It was an awe-inspiring show,” said Michael McGinnis, a partner at Mnuchin, remembering its impact when he was the head of contemporary art at Phillips. 

Stellar reviews followed and Koons’s auction market took off, crossing $20 million in auction sales for the first time that year. It would not sink below that level until the global pandemic hit in 2020, when annual sales plummeted to just $2.7 million.

Mnuchin’s show, set for late April, will present 25 artworks spanning the artist’s entire five-decade career. “It will be a wow, wow, wow kind of show,” McGinnis said, declining to elaborate on the specific works because loans have not been finalized.

Jeff Koons, Hot Dog, 2002. © Jeff Koons Courtesy of Skarstedt

Those in the know whispered that hedge-fund billionaire and Mets owner Steve Cohen may loan his yellow Balloon Dog (1994–2000), instead of the orange sibling that was in the original show, courtesy of its then owner, Peter Brant. (Yes, it does fit!) Sadly, the Rabbit, which was in the 2004 show, is unlikely to make an appearance. (Museums hold three of the four pieces in the edition; the only one in private hands was reportedlybought by Cohen in 2019 and subsequently resold to billionaire financier Ken Griffin, market insiders told me.)

Back in Hong Kong, AIG’s lineup will include works that have become icons after appearing in prestigious exhibitions, such as the artist’s 2014 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Large Vase of Flowers, 1991, a massive, intricately carved wood bouquet, graced the cover of the Whitney’s exhibition catalog.) Terase and Cappellazzo are preparing for crowds, given the value of the artworks and their consequent insurance requirements.

“There will be a line around the block to see the show,” Cappellazzo said.

Several pieces have been closely linked to Joannou’s massive art collection, and they return to the market after decades. Take One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Spalding Dr. JK 241 Series), a seminal 1985 work comprising a basketball suspended in a tank. Joannou saw it at Koons’s first solo exhibition at the International With Monument Gallery in New York’s East Village. It made a memorable first impression, he said, “something I couldn’t get out of my mind.” He bought the work for $2,700.

“And that’s how eventually I got to meet Jeff and the whole thing started from there,” Joannou told me.   

Joannou went on to acquire examples from almost every subsequent series Koons made (until the two most recent ones). He waited six years to get the red Balloon Dog, the first puppy from the “Celebration” series (and only after paying for its production). Twenty years would go by before he received a giant pile of Play-Doh (1994–2014).

Jeff Koons & Dakis Joannou, 2004, by Todd Eberle © Todd Eberle
Courtesy: DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art

The artist and his patron became close over the years. Joannou is the godfather of Koons’s son Ludwig. The artist created the famously unorthodox (camouflage-inspired) look of his collector’s yacht, Guilty, and designed a heart-shaped wedding cake for his daughter’s wedding. (That concoction featured 2½-foot-tall figures of a swan and a rabbit that would later become 12- and 14-foot-tall sculptures.) The two men’s families vacationed together on Greek islands. In 2010, Joannou invited Koons to curate a controversial show of his collection at the New Museum.

But the most poignant manifestation of their friendship appeared two years ago on the island of Hydra in Greece, where each summer Joannou’s Deste Foundation taps contemporary artists to transform a small, cliff-side former slaughterhouse into an art display.

Notoriously controlling and perfectionist, Koons held the details of the project in absolute secrecy, making everyone involved sign non-disclosure agreements, according to Joannou, who first saw it just half an hour before the public opening.

“It was like giving me a present of the first impression,” he said.  

What he saw left him speechless. Koons transformed the dark, rugged bunker space into a temple to Apollo, complete with replicas of ancient frescoes discovered in a house near Pompeii (now displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), a polychrome animatronic sculpture of the Greek sun god accompanied by a snake flicking its tongue, and a 30-foot-wide, blazing-gold wind spinner shaped like the sun, mounted on the roof to greet boats entering the port.

Jeff Koons, Apollo Windspinner, 2020–2022. Installation view of the exhibition “Jeff Koons: Apollo,” DESTE Foundation, Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra  © Jeff Koons, Photo: Eftychia Vlachou.

“I think of it as the island’s Statue of Liberty,” said Linda Yablonsky, the author of a forthcoming biography of Koons. “For those of us who know Dakis and know Jeff, that was a very touching and meaningful gesture.”

Meanwhile, just as this column was going to print, Koons’s artworks—small replicas of the moon—landed on the lunar surface, the first authorized artworks to reach that rocky terrain. Koons’s ability to pull off such a feat is what gives his fans confidence in their investments, despite market turbulence.

“He’s moving every time in the area that you could not have even imagined,” Joannou said when we spoke. “You can never catch up with him. Now he’s off to the moon!”

Koons’s market is also ready for blastoff, his boosters argue.

“This is the right time to buy Jeff Koons,” said Alberto Mugrabi, a collector and trader whose family bought the orange Balloon Dog for $58.4 million in 2013. “Jeff Koons has only one way to go, and that’s up.”