Odds and ends
An update on Jordan Silverman, new episodes of Collateral Damage, and some fall photos from Nashville
Greetings, readers. Just a quick post today to update you on a few items.
First, some feedback on on my investigation of the accusations against Jordan Silverman.
The post was given a “laurel” by the Columbia Journalism Review. It also resulted in some encouraging soul searching on the forum DCUrbanMoms, the main online hub where the accusations against him tended to percolate (including an apology from the moderator)
Finally, one of Silverman’s friends set up a GoFundMe to help with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal debt he has accumulated. I can confirm that the fundraiser is legitimate.
Since I last posted about it, we’ve published a few more episodes of my podcast Collateral Damage, which takes a deep dive into old cases of people wrongly killed by bad drug war policy. The entire series has become newly relevant given Trump administration’s use of the drug war to justify all sorts of punitive and ill-advised actions, from his tariffs and immigration crackdown to what’s increasingly looking like a war with Venezuela.
But the latest episode, which went live today is especially resonant right now. It’s a a look at the deaths of Veronica and Charity Bowers, a Christian missionary and her toddler daughter whose plane shot down over Peru in 2001 as part of a CIA drug interdiction program. The U.S. and Peruvian officials mistakenly believed the plane was smuggling drugs. The program has parallels to the extrajudicial executions the current administration is carrying out off the coast of Latin America, the current “program” appears to be quite a bit more reckless.
For that episode, you’ll also hear from Peter Hoekstra, an ex-congressman who represented the Bowers. We interviewed him in 2023, and he was still angry about what happened to his constituents. He’s now a senior member of the Trump administration, and hasn’t said a word about the drug boat bombings.
Here’s a quick summary of the other Collateral Damage episodes available since I last posted about the series:
Episode 2: A death in the dark
Longtime readers of my work may remember the name Ryan Frederick. In 2008, Frederick shot and killed police detective Jarrod Shivers during a drug raid on Frederick’s home. Frederick had no prior record, and there was no evidence that he was selling any drugs. But he had been growing some marijuana plants for his own use. He was arrested and charged with capital murder. It would later come out, through my own reporting and that of others, that the police informants who tipped authorities off about Frederick had illegally broken into his home to find the pot plants that provided probable cause for the raid. One informant told me that they had done this in lots of other cases, with the knowledge and consent of law enforcement. Frederick was ultimately convicted of manslaughter, and got out of prison after about eight years. We interviewed him for this episode.
Here we look at the death of LaBron Gaither, a Kentucky teenager who agreed to become a police drug informant after an altercation with a staff member at his school. Gaither’s parents never consented to him becoming an informant. After working with police dozens of times, he was brought into two public courthouses to testify to grand juries about alleged drug dealing in the area — without any effort to conceal his identity. One grand juror tipped off a local drug dealer, the same dealer police were planning to target in an undercover sting, with Gaither as bait. The Kentucky State Police lost track of Gaither during that sting. They later found his body. He had been tortured and shot. We also look at other cases in which young people have been coerced into informant work, often with similarly tragic results. And we talked to Gaither’s brother, who is now a police officer himself.
This might be my favorite episode. We look at the remarkable life and tragic death of Peter McWilliams, a fascinating figure who was a writer, poet, gadget guru, photographer, self-help speaker, cult member, cult critic, civil libertarian, and activist, among other things. McWilliams had friendships with everyone from William F. Buckley, Jr., to Stephen Sondheim, to Hugh Hefner. He was a regular guest on Larry King Live, and the “tech correspondent” for the Today Show. Here he discussing some new gadgets with Bryant Gumbel:
After contracting AIDS and then non-Hodgkins lymphoma in the 1990s, McWilliams found that only smoking pot allowed him to keep down the drugs that were keeping him alive. He became a fierce advocate for medical marijuana. That put a target on his back for the Clinton administration, which was fighting the growing movement to legalize the drug for medicinal purposes.
Federal law enforcement officers eventually raided McWilliams’s home, arrested him, and charged him under federal conspiracy laws. He was able to post bail, but one condition of his bail was that he not smoke marijuana. Unable to keep down his AIDS cocktail and chemotherapy drugs, he began to waste away, and eventually died alone before he could make it to trial. I love this episode because we really tried to celebrate McWilliams’s life as much as we documented his death. I hope we also gave some needed credited to the role gay activists played in bringing the country around on medical marijuana.
Episode 5: What Fourth Amendment?
Here we look at the killing of Trevon Cole, a Las Vegas man. Police raided his home over a pot sale, then shot him dead as he tried to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet. They also confused him with another Trevon Cole when obtaining a search warrant, and may have been trying to create dramatic content for the TV show Cops. Cole was killed in front of his pregnant fiancée. As we interviewed her, we were joined by an unexpected guest — Cole’s daughter, who was born shortly after his death. Now 15, she and her mother talked to use about her dad, how his death has impacted her life, and police violence. She’s a really impressive kid
If you enjoyed the podcast, I hope you’ll consider giving it a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. Those reviews go a long way toward building a larger audience.
And I’d like to express my gratitude again to show runner Laura Flynn and producer Andrew Stelzer for all of their help on this project, along with the rest of the crew at The Intercept, and the Vital Projects Fund, which provided a grant to help us make this. None of it would have happened without them.
I’ll close with a few photos of the fall color here in Nashville. On this particular morning they were obscured by fog, but in a lovely, moody sort of way.
Glad to see the go fund me for Silverman. Appreciate the link to the DC moms blog, interesting read through the comments.
Donated. Thank you for all that you do to make this world a more just place.