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The first I’d heard about an alternative lifestyle called “down low” was when Dr. Monica Sweeney spoke of it at the Health Crisis meeting called by Congressman Major Owens.   She explained, “What is ‘life on the down low?’  That means there are men who are married or otherwise connected to a female partner, who, when they have their infidelities, have it with men and their partners are totally unsuspecting.”  
Where did this kind of behavior come from, this “down low” lifestyle of men sleeping with men? Provocatively featured in The New York Times Magazine, this behavior that Dr. Sweeney warned us about is spreading HIV/AIDS throughout African-American communities to devastating effects.   “It comes from the prison system,” said the caller to WBAI (99.5FM), and her words rang true.  Of course the prison system would play a part in this.  After all, that’s where the unbelted pants and untied shoes come from.  And sex in prisons is a long-known worldwide phenomenon that comes from incarcerating men for long periods of time.  The race of the person has nothing to do with it.  But here in the United States, we have a situation where blacks, while only 13% of the U.S. population, are 50% of all prison inmates.  In fact, the Justice Policy Institute notes, “Between 1980 and 2000, it is estimated that African-American men were added to the prison system at 3 times the rate they were added to colleges. During that period, 21,800 African American men were estimated to have been added to the prison system and 7,247 were added to colleges.  In 2000, one out of three young black men was either locked up, on probation, or on parole.”   This explains how Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn has an enrollment that is 78% female, mirroring the situation we find at Historically Black Colleges across the country. 
In New York State, these men come  mostly from neighborhoods here in the city, and if you live in central Brooklyn, then “behind the  prison wall” is really the room in the next building.  And when men are released from a punitive rather than rehabilitating environment, from an environment that does not allow them to learn, to grow and to come to their senses, and they are dropped off on the street by bus or subway directly from the prison door without being phased into society, then many times the behaviors they were practicing yesterday are transferred to the next block or around the corner.   
The Lowdown on the “Down Low”:
And yet that doesn’t explain where it comes from, this acting on a desire, while uncaringly and wantonly spreading disease throughout the general population.  Dr. Amos Wilson said that when you look at this kind of situation, you have to ask, “Who benefits from this aberration in the Black man’s mind?  What is the social, political and economic benefit, and for whom?” 
Who Profits?
Taking Dr. Wilson’s admonitions to heart we ask, “What is the social role, function and benefits of this behavior, who profits?”
If you look at the net effect of this reported “downlow” culture, it has to be acknowledged as being a White supremacist’s favorite dream.  Black men removing themselves from sexual competition for females, and when they do compete in the heterosexual market, they spread the highly communicable and deadly disease, HIV/AIDS.  While being highly profitable for the pharmaceutical and health care industries, at the same time it destroys the African-American community, certainly making it easier here in Brooklyn for Whites to buy or “gentrify” as these system beneficiaries innocently call it when they smilingly move in up the block.
Continuum of Community Destruction
This disease and takeover of the Black communities is occurring at the end of a forty-year process, so let’s take a look at how we got here.  In the December 1999 issue of OTP, we wrote about the history of  Africans-in-America and the continuum of States’methods used to break down our communities.  The following is an excerpt from that issue.
 “After the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there was a quickening impatience with the White supremacist culture of the United States.  The anger erupted in the street rebellions of the 60’s.  These were first met with troops and tanks and then as the anger became more focused and organized, there was a Counter-Intelligence Program.  Known as COINTELPRO, this operation combined city, state and federal law enforcement agencies in a joint effort to destroy the increasingly militant activism of the African-American community. Groups like the Black Panther Party were infiltrated and destroyed.  Misinformation was sown and African-American dissenters were treated by law enforcement agencies in the same way as dissenters are in any country with very strict rules for minority people and dissenting opinions.  Some like Fred Hampton were murdered in their beds.  Others were shot down in the streets or jailed on false charges.   This history continues to live on in prisons where many of those politically-active black people are still held today. 
 One of the things that may have been learned by COINTELPRO operatives was that African-Americans are an unusually resilient and community-centered people – there is a legacy of spirituality and self-help-and a way had to be found to break that.   It was during the Sixties that highly addictive and debilitating compounds, drugs, became readily available in African-American communities across the country.  If you want to know where in the world the drugs at the corner were coming from, look to where in the world the CIA was active at the time. In the Sixties, the heroin epidemic came in from CIA cohorts in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. This is extensively documented in Al McCoy’s book, “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.”
Going into minute detail, McCoy shows how the CIA’s connection with its covert allies led directly to the heroin epidemic of the 1960’s. The crack explosion coincided with the CIA’s work on behalf of the Reagan administration in support of the Nicaraguan Contras in the mid-Eighties. In Dark Alliance, investigative reporter Gary Webb reveals the connections between the Contras, the CIA and the crack epidemic of the 1980’s.   In one instance, Danilo Blandon, a CIA “asset”, was reported to have brought in “easily” 55 tons of cocaine between 1980 and 1991.   This is only one of the people controlling deliveries destined for African-American communities. As one convicted deputy put it in Dark Alliance, “I didn’t pump 500 tons of cocaine into the ghetto.  The United States government can’t say that.”
Prison “Seasoning”: Updating Human Software
One of the distinguishing features of the slavery business was the one-to-three-year formal process known as “seasoning.”  This was when new captives from Africa were terrorized and programmed into slavery and their roles on the plantations.  If we were to judge the United States as we do people, that is by what it does rather than by what it says, then the current criminal justice system can be seen as an updated version of the “seasoning” process.  It catches unending streams of black men and puts them into cages for the installation of new behavior software to fit the current needs of the ruling classes.   Farmwork is long past and the industrial age is shifting offshore.  The remnants of those jobs and the remaining technical, government and small businesses can be handled by a much smaller workforce.   There are people needed in the service areas, but according to a New York judge, those folks won’t need more than an eighth-grade education. 
So one of the things that is done is shown in a report from the College Consortium at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. They note that “in 1994, under a provision of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, Congress eliminated inmate eligibility for Pell Grants. Allowing inmate access to Pell Grants was viewed as taking money away from law-abiding citizens, despite the fact that inmate education accounted for 1/10 of 1% of the Pell Grants’ annual budget.  At the time that federal support was removed, extensive research demonstrated that recidivism rates decline significantly with higher education.  Despite the evidence, by 1995, all but eight of the 350 college programs in prisons were closed nationwide. As public funds for college education in all New York State prisons were eliminated, a successful college program at BHCF, run by Mercy College from 1984 through 1994, closed its doors. Given the extraordinarily low levels of educational achievement with which most enter prison, this loss was not only educationally consequential but also, according to reports from women and corrections officers at BHCF, profound in terms of morale and discipline.” 
Did you spot the enemy’s PR marker in the above paragraph?  It’s “viewed as taking money away from law-abiding citizens.”   That’s the way a lobbyist says, “You’re taking money from White people and giving it to Blacks.”  What’s left unspoken is that it’s being used to give them an education and the collective subconscious, part social-engineering and part genetics, does not even want them to survive.
New Technology Leads Way
to Solving Control Problem
One of the technologies used in WWI was social engineering, and the importance of the work of Dr. Edward Bernays, “The Father of Public Relations,” cannot be overstated. Bernays was the author of Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928) and The Engineering of Consent (1947).  During the war, he worked for the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), the group charged with marketing the war to the American people.  It was they who developed the WWI rallying cry, “To make the world safe for democracy,” to help bind the nation behind the war, and also to create the template for all the war-rallying that has followed.  From these kinds of government projects, as well as work being done with mass psychology in the private sector, it would indicate that state-of-the-art social engineering  is a tool that any ruling class or business has in its kit. 
I believe it is this cumulative use in business and government, expressed most visibly in advertising and political action committees, that creats a collective subconscious that is always looking for profit and racial control and because it’s exercised mostly by Whites, there is a peculiar sense of racial superiority and animosity is exercised as well.  That’s why an obvious solution – education in prisons – is a very difficult idea.
This subconscious would have had two intolerable situations developing after WWII.  African-American businesses were growing  in pockets around the country and African-American children, taught in second-class schools by first-class teachers who believed in them, were becoming increasingly militant and vocal. 
Working in a way that is not a conspiracy but has the effect of one, government and business were able to take the journey for equal rights, for which African-Americans had marched and fought for during the Fifties and Sixties, and transform it into a movement that “wins” by having White businesses accept Black patronage and demanding that European people educate (or miseducate, according to Carter G. Woodson) Black children.
A  popular quote by Bernays  from Propaganda is, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitutes an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country…. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
“My People are Destroyed for Lack
of Knowledge…” Hosea 3:6
Referring to what is needed to cure the current conditions of Africans in America, Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood, of East New York’s St. Paul Community Baptist Church, says that “when ‘our’ masses begin acknowledging and purging the pain of the past, profound political, social and economic change is inevitable.”   Toward that end, for the last nine years St. Paul has hosted a “Commemoration of the MAAFA”, a Kiswali term encompassing the experience of millions of Africans during the Middle Passage, when they were brought to the Americas for enslavement. 
In workshops and seminars led by experts in their field, the Commemoration seeks to reveal the American situation and that “The way out is back through.”  And in that knowledge we have the key to stopping unhealthy, self-destructive and community-degrading behavior.   We have to also remember that in a very real way, helping us to rebuild will be an old spirit.    Brought together by technology and the conditions of African people worldwide, there is a new excitement around Pan-Africanism, the work of the African Union and the tantalizing promise of the synergy of the AU’s proposed “Region Six”, comprised of the Diaspora with all of its economic and political potential.
If we can stop the violence, stop the disease, and exercise the right to

By Eric Adams
President of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care

Throughout the city, our children are reaching the sad conclusion of their summer vacation and are starting to mentally prepare themselves for the day-to-day responsibilities that school brings.  In contrast to the young people’s response, parents are celebrating the comfort of knowing that during the day hours their children are in the type of control environment that school brings.  No matter how much we criticize the Board of Education, many parents identify with the potential of receiving a quality education for those who are willing to apply themselves and burn the old-fashioned “midnight oil.” 
Just as parents are in a joyous mood, there are other groups who unfortunately look forward to the return of school for the wrong reasons.  This is because the school year brings about an entire industry of individuals who are able to carry out their craft in an easier fashion during the school year.  In fact, their season closes down during the summer months and picks up when the doors of the school are open. 
If you think I am talking about clothing retailers or school supply merchants, then you are wrong.  This group is made up of people who prey on our children.  The list includes those who are pedophiles, drug dealers, child molesters and the individuals who commit predatory crimes, such as rape and robbery. 
They exploit the lax atmosphere that a routine school year brings and use it to carry out their craft of preying on our children.  The organized structure of a school year makes it easy to monitor our children’s movements and time schedule.  This gives those who want to harm our children ten months to hone and carry out their plans.  And they would not stop at anything to reach their goal.  That is why it is important to meet their vigilance with an equal level of vigilance. 
It is unfortunate that many parents do not have a clue on where to start
implementing proactive steps to protect their children.  Our organization has long carried out workshops to explain simple child safety tips.  There are a number of web sites and organizations that also inform parents on how to ensure the safety of their children.  The mistake that is made is when parents believe they have all the answers and refuse to tap into the proven tactics of experts. 
Some of the tips that our organization recommends for parents includes choosing routes that you want your child to take to and from school.  This is important because if a child is abducted and needs to have a search conducted, the responding law enforcement officers will know where to conduct the search.  It is also recommended to identify safety locations along the route.  The location could be a store, church, police station, etc., and it will serve as an emergency location where your child can go if he or she feels threatened.
Other tactics include having a frank conversation about drugs.  Only saying no to drugs is just not going to cut it.  You must back up talk with actions that includes routine examination of their physical state.  Become abreast with the physical and mental characteristics that are associated with drug use. 
Other challenges that face your child may come from areas that may appear harmless like the internet.  Each year sexual predators surf the Internet in hopes of alluring your child away from you.  Our only defense is to modernize our approach to protecting them at that same rate that others are adapting to harm them.  We must meet force with force.  The safety of our children depends on it.

(Part I of a Series)
By Vira Lynn Jones
This article is a frantic scream for help in exposing my three-year fight with the New York City Housing Preservation and Development Agency (HPD).  The battle has left me both emotionally and mentally scarred, but I refuse to feel defeated.   The sad reality is, I may lose my house.  In  October 2001, HPD slapped an $86,000 lien on my four-family Clinton Hill home for a violation that existed on the property when I purchased it in 1996. 
Despite the fact that the real estate developer and former owner, Alfred Basal of Aviv Development, failed to install the sprinkler system or fire escape that is required for a four-family house, the NYC Buildings Department issued him a legitimate Certificate of Occupancy  (Cof O) which assured that the house was violations-free.  This document satisfied the bank in setting my closing date. 
The original lien was nearly $100,000.  After some pressure on my part, it was reduced a few thousand dollars; yet, I have since paid more than $12,000 towards the installation of a fire escape (something that should have been done by Mr. Basal and enforced by the Buildings Department). The $86,000 looms, like a dark cloud. Years of protest against having to pay for the mess created by the developer and the Buildings Department has been to no avail.   Meanwhile, other homeowners in Clinton Hill, Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant have shared with me similar horror stories of the pressure wrought by groups, associations and city departments to move, to vacate, to sell and even to give up the homes and apartments that they worked all their lives to keep and pass on.   Gentrification is a nice word but in the hands of the unscrupulous, it is a benign cancer.  The evil form of it is festering not only in our local New York City neighborhoods.  It is growing throughout America, in urban areas where hardworking homestead owners of African descent are losing all that they spent years to build and grow.
Some of us will not surrender without a fight, and I am one of them.   I worked two full-time jobs for five years to purchase this brownstone.  Financial considerations forced me to go out and look for a building; I was tired of paying huge rents for small apartments. Yet it was my heritage that inspired home ownership as a life goal.  My parents were of a Southern background and they were obsessed with owning land.  My father always said, “You don’t sell it, you pass it on.”
HPD officials told me that the agency is not in the business of taking possession of private homes, yet they admit that the lien against my property can be sold to an investor. This investor has the right to charge me 25 percent interest, force me into foreclosure and take possession of my house.  Some nights I wonder if the law would allow Mr. Basal to come back into this building’s life and purchase the lien that is against it.
Mr. Basal owned this property for only two years – from 1994 till 1996.  He converted it from a boardinghouse or Single-Room Occupancy dwelling (SRO) to a legal four-family dwelling. A copy of the architect’s plans that Basal filed with the city reveals that a sprinkler system was included in the plans but never installed. HPD has never explained to me how Basal was issued a valid C of O when the house should not have passed Buildings Department inspection.  Instead of receiving an answer, I have been treated as the culprit.  Little did I realize, however, that my battle was just beginning.
In August 2001, after I had lived in my house for almost four years (it has now been seven years), an official from the HPD’s Brooklyn office appeared on my stoop demanding to access the building to inspect my sprinkler system.  When I told him that I did not have one, he left.  I thought the issue was over.  However, two hours later, a fire engine pulls in front on my building.  To keep them from smashing in the door with their axes, I thrust it open as three firemen rushed in and up the steps, explaining in their haste that they had arrived to inspect the sprinkler system.  They froze in their footsteps and left after I said that I did not have one.  It did not stop there.
By September 2001, the situation had further deteriorated.  An HPD official gained access to my building without my knowledge and slid an “Order To Repair Vacate” notice under the door of every occupant in the building.  The order demanded that everyone had three days to vacate the premises.  The order was only rescinded when I faxed HPD official Nari Motwani a copy of my C of O and he verified that it was a valid document.  On that day I also found out that my house was still noted on record as a boardinghouse.  As my problems with HPD continued to escalate, I called Consumer Affairs to investigate whether Basal had any complaints lodged against him because of the nightmare he had caused me.  Basal’s claim of a so-called newly renovated property was actually bubble gum, tape and Band-Aids to hold the building together until he could flip it.  He had installed and painted PVC plastic pipe to trick one into believing it was cast iron.  It eventually pulled apart at the joints and flooded two apartments and the basement.  A supposedly new boiler burned out after only four years.  Three days after my closing date, I went to Keyspan (formerly Brooklyn Union Gas) to have the gas switched to my name.  Two week later, Keyspan sends me a bill for $5,000.  Basal had tapped into the gas line and was receiving free gas.  After presenting evidence to the Keyspan investigator, I did not have to pay the bill.  The gas meters that were already installed in the basement were listed on a Keyspan list as stolen.  So were the electric meters that Con Edison removed.  There was carpeting throughout the apartments and I had to pull it up and install hardwood floors.  As I was told by the carpenter, “If you do not stabilize the floors, one night you will wake up and your tenants will be in your bedroom.”  Despite explaining this to HPD officials and showing them evidence, I was beginning to be treated as the criminal culprit who created this mess.  Little did I know HPD was not finished with me.
A few days after the vacate order was rescinded, HPD had a surprise waiting in my house that was never discussed with me.  I arrived home from my day job to find two strangers in my building.  At first, they did not identify themselves.  When I threatened to call the police and have them removed, they explained that they were from Epic Security and were assigned to my house by HPD.  I called HPD and protested profusely.  Joseph Manganiello, an HPD official in the Manhattan office, said if I tried to have the guards removed that he would call the fire department and have me and anyone else living in the building physically removed.  I told him HPD was harassing me.  Manganiello said HPD was only doing its job.
The security guards were posted in my house 24 hours a day, six days a week for six months until the fire escape was installed because a permit had to be obtained from the landmarks commission. The security guards caused me a tremendous amount of grief.  I had refused HPD’s request to give the guards keys to the building because I felt they were poorly supervised.  Every other day a new security guard would appear.  Some guards never showed up for their shift and the front doors would remain unlocked as I slept through the night.  More than once the guards would disappear up the street on a break leaving the doors sitting open inviting anyone walking by to easily access the building.  I had resigned myself to expect to come home and be informed that the building had been burglarized.  My worst fear was to walk into the building and surprise an intruder who would rob me, or even worse, take my life. After complaining to Epic Security about its employees, a drastic change took place.  The guards were not only more professional but they started to share information with me.
Since my building was a private house and not an HPD-owned property, they did not understand why guards had been placed in my building.  They also wanted me to know that Epic Security Guards were stationed in many other properties throughout Clinton Hill.
At the beginning of this entire ordeal, I bombarded HPD and the Buildings Department with letters and telephone calls asking for emergency funds to install the fire escape.  No response ever materialized.  Finally after a year (when the statute of limitations has already passed to take any action), I received a letter from HPD Associate Commissioner Vito Mustaciuolo.  He said he realized that the incident was not my fault, that I had paid for the fire escape but I would be held responsible for paying the $86,000 for the fire watch.  When I asked about a payment plan, he advised me to get an attorney.  I had already been through an ordeal with attorneys.
The Brooklyn Bar Association referred me to an attorney who wanted a $7,500 retainer on the spot before he would take the case. I walked out of the office.  Other attorneys saw my distressed situation as an opportunity for economic gain.  They all wanted large retainers.  Finally, in June 2002, PrePaid Legal referred me to Bradley Zelenitz of _____________, who assured me, after paying a $2,000 retainer, that I would finally receive justice by suing the city, the seller, the lawyer who conducted my closing and the title company.  A year later, the law firm has not done anything but sue Alfred Basal.  Then Zelenitz told me that if I did win the case against Basal, I would probably never collect because he has hidden his funds.  Now the attorney does not return my calls and I have no idea about the status of my case.  Then I thought that the elected officials, whom I was told were voter-friendly, would help me.  Months after sending letters to the Public Advocate’s Office, the Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, I haven’t gotten any response.
Friends and acquaintances laughed and told me that I am paranoiac.  I mentioned that the powers that be want my house and why have I heard other African-Americans in the neighborhood say they are experiencing similar problems. This reality hit me in November 2001 when two men from HPD’s Anti-Abandonment Unit paid me an unexpected visit.  Their boss had sent them to inspect the interior of my house.  Through the compliments on the renovation job that I was doing, they asked me if I realized that my house would one day be worth a million dollars.  I had never thought about it but it made me realize one thing.  Because of its predominantely African American homeownership population, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill are probably the only two neighborhoods in the entire United States that have a disproportionate number of millionaires if they were to sell their homes.  Longtime residents say the neighborhood was once plagued by drugs and prostitution, and one could not give the brownstones away.
I feel that this problem is larger than the ordeal that I have experienced.  Many others are going through the same thing because I am often asked in conversations, “Why are so many black folks losing their homes all of a sudden”?  If I must go down in defeat, like a soldier I will fight to the end by exposing what I think is a larger problem in the Clinton Hill community.