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TIME International
June 3, 1996 Volume 147, No. 23
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TO OUR READERS
While Bill Clinton and Bob Dole jockey for position in November's U.S. presidential election, another political contest is much closer at hand, and more significant. In a few weeks Gennadi Zyuganov and Boris Yeltsin will face off in the second presidential election ever held in Russia. The choice is so stark, and the result so important, that Time decided to cover the campaign as thoroughly as we would an American presidential race.
"I was impressed with how willing the people were to talk openly about the issues and the candidates," says Time's chief political correspondent Michael Kramer. For two weeks, Kramer and veteran Moscow reporter Yuri Zarakhovich followed Yeltsin around the country, while Washington correspondent James Carney, returning to his old posting in Russia, tracked Zyuganov. Back in Moscow, correspondent Sally Donnelly and stringer Constance Richards filed background reports; picture editor Mark Rykoff directed a team of 10 photographers; and Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, a longtime Soviet watcher, returned to a much changed Moscow to take the city's pulse. Coordinating the complex operation was Moscow bureau chief John Kohan, who drew on his eight years of experience in Russia. The result of the team effort is this week's special report on the precarious state of democracy in the former Soviet Union.
Hong Kong correspondent John Colmey considers Nepal one of his favorite travel destinations. Unlike his previous trips, though, his journey to Katmandu last week was not for pleasure. Within hours of receiving his marching orders to cover the tragedy on Mount Everest, Colmey flew from Kuala Lumpur, where he had been on assignment, to Bangkok. From there he called our Nepalese stringer and rattled off an 18-point list of things to do. Colmey arrived at the Katmandu airport at the same time as a friend of Japanese climber Yasuko Namba, who died in the storm, and thus got his first interview. By the time he reached Hotel Vajra, where he has stayed several times, his contacts there had arranged for him to meet everyone from Sherpas to ministry officials. His work did not go completely smoothly, however. "I could not send E-mail from Katmandu," Colmey reports. "But the climbers, with the aid of satellite phones, had no problem reaching the Internet from 8,000 m in -25[degrees]."
CHRIS REDMAN
It is with good reason that the Mafia is called "the octopus": its tentacles penetrate into virtually every sphere of private and public life in Italy--and other nations as well. Though we at TIME would hardly welcome comparison with the Mafia in any other respect, we do take pride in our own octopus-like ability to reach in multiple directions and wrap around a story. That's what we did last week when news broke that Italian police had cornered Giovanni ("the Pig") Brusca, one of the most powerful and brutal bosses in Cosa Nostra history.
Talking the story through in a series of phone calls between editors in New York City and journalists in Europe, we agreed that Brusca's arrest was not only a great yarn but a landmark event that could help shift the balance in the war against the Mafia. After the decision was made to go after the story in a big way, we asked for two parts, a vivid close-up of the police action outside Agrigento, and a wide-angle look at the complex factors that perpetuate organized crime--and the heroic efforts mounted to snuff it out.
Greg Burke, our man in Rome, teamed up with reporter Toula Vlahou and a pair of Palermo-based experts to examine the state's long battle and recent successes against the Mafia. Rome photo editor Simonetta Toraldo gathered a selection of telling photographs. Soon files were shooting out to writers Thomas Sancton and Rod Usher from our Rome-based crew and from New York correspondent Elaine Rivera.
Armed with that reporting as well as voluminous materials snatched from cyberspace and culled from our Paris and London libraries, Usher hunkered down to work in his home office outside Barcelona. For him it was familiar territory. Not only has he frequently written about Italian politics for TIME, but before joining our staff in 1988, he had run an investigation of the Mafia in Australia for The Age newspaper in Melbourne.
Meanwhile, Paris bureau chief Tom Sancton tackled the main narrative. He has never specialized in writing about crime, but he's one of our most versatile craftsme--with knowledge of everything from politics to jazz--and a master at spinning a dramatic tale.
So what is the prognosis for Italy's campaign to wipe out the Mafia? "I am heartened by the capture of a major boss," says Burke. "But I think it will be decades, not years, before the Mafia gets eradicated. And that's too bad, because the vast majority of Italians are absolutely splendid people. They really don't deserve to be in the middle of a war."
Chris Redman Europe Editor