The Ghost Network (14 page)

Berliner and Kraus met in a coffee shop in Wicker Park shortly after he began walking. At the time, Kraus worked as the Chief Officer in Charge of Recruitment for the recently formed New Situationists. In contradiction to her intentionally ironic title, Kraus’s job was to dismiss or divert anyone who seemed captivated by the New Situationists, whether the interest was academic, political, or personal. Her job was difficult; she not only had to convince people to give up their curiosity, she had to convince them that there was nothing to be curious about. “The New Situationists can’t exist,”
she often reminded Berliner. “That was how Debord would’ve wanted it.”
^§

Well-suited to her position with the New Situationists, Kraus gave a first impression of cold indifference; she rarely developed sentimental attachments. With David Wilson, she was the exception to the New Situationists’ program of extreme secrecy. While the two of them would have some level of visibility among the members and to the outside world, every other member remained hidden as much as possible. Later, after the New Situationists made themselves known through their act of domestic terrorism, the State Prosecutors and the public conflated the New Situationists’ historic secretiveness with long-term plans for the bombing. However, Kraus always insisted the Chicago Subway Bombings were a flight of fancy, planned in a few months, maximum; the secrecy grew out of an adherence to Situationist principles, plus a flair for theater.

“We were not above some
Eyes Wide Shut–
esque displays. Not the orgy part, but the masks, the passwords, the secrecy. We were feeling very dramatic at the time. We wore animal masks like in some movie,” Kraus told Anna Kirkpatrick during a 2009 exclusive video interview for Kirkpatrick’s political commentary show on MSNBC. During the same interview, Kirkpatrick asked, “Most of a decade has passed since the New Situationists disbanded. Can you tell us what they were exactly?” Kraus responded, “Anna, what makes you think the New Situationists have disbanded?”
^ǁ

At the coffee shop where Kraus and Berliner met, the first location of the high-end organic coffee retailer Intelligentsia, Berliner sometimes flirted with a young vegan barista named Anna. He often talked to Anna about his devotion and compulsion to walk. Anna also knew Kraus, a regular at the café, and had seen her reading a book about Debord and psychogeography. When Berliner and Kraus happened to stop in at the same time, Anna suggested Berliner ask Kraus for book recommendations. They spoke for a little while and left separately, but Berliner had already developed a bit of a teenage crush. Berliner walked to the coffee shop when he knew Kraus would be there, acting surprised to see her, and asking her if he could sit down at her table. After a few weeks of this, Berliner dropped the ruse and planned his run-ins with Kraus; they met several times a week to discuss urban planning philosophies and music.

Kraus didn’t like Berliner at first, but she never liked anybody at first. She slowly warmed to him, then surprised herself by thinking about the strange teenager when he wasn’t around. She broke up with her boyfriend of a year, a non–New Situationist, and a month later realized she’d broken up with him for Berliner. On a Saturday afternoon in August, she invited Berliner back to her mod apartment in the Ukrainian Village, and took his virginity on her maple platform bed.

Kraus was pleased that Berliner didn’t say anything too sentimental after their first time having sex; she was also pleased that he fell asleep with his head on her chest while she smoked a cigarette, drank wine, and thought about him. After a thirty minute post-coital nap, Kraus woke Berliner. She slowly and thoroughly explained that she had what previous lovers had called an “architectural fetish,” which she became aware of during a therapy session when she was sixteen. Under hypnosis, she had remembered her twelve-year-old self, masturbating against certain kinds of doorways because the molding was more beautiful. Kraus told Berliner that while she was pleased with devirginizing him, the two of them
couldn’t continue a sexual relationship if he didn’t feel comfortable indulging in her preferred sexual practices. Kraus needn’t have worried. Kraus’s descriptions of her preferences were arousing to Berliner. He happily became her sexual protégé.

They began a secret affair. They talked extensively about their personal histories and the historical architecture of Chicago. Kraus introduced Berliner to Debord and the Situationists and he learned quickly. Even while avoiding Dana and Raulson, the lovers found a way to see each other every day. Sometimes, after Berliner’s mother and grandmother had gone to sleep, Kraus snuck into Berliner’s basement and spent the night in his bed. She attended most of his baseball games, pretending to be the cousin of one of Berliner’s teammates, an outfielder whose parents never came to games. She sat in the bleachers, wearing black high-waist jeans, a white button-down shirt, and one of many colored scarves, heckling like she was at Comiskey Park. She drank beer from the bottle or whiskey from a flask and smoked clove cigarettes until the mothers asked her to stop.

The New Situationists were mostly supportive of Kraus’s relationship. Some of them had known her for many years and were amused that she’d finally become enamored of someone. They weren’t happy, though, when Kraus asked to bring Berliner into the group. Up to this point, Kraus had done a thorough job squashing any scrutiny of the NS and its members. Because of Kraus’s efforts, the group was invisible to the outside world and their identities were secret from her and from each other. Asking to bring Berliner in, the antithesis of her job, surprised the other New Situationists despite the depth of her feelings. But because the New Situationist higher-ups respected Kraus, they agreed to see Berliner. They all met in an empty office in a building in the middle of the Loop. Each member of the New Situationists who interviewed Berliner wore a full-face animal mask and used voice-modulating devices when they spoke. They quizzed Berliner about his school and political
beliefs, but the thing that really struck them was Berliner’s story about his grandmother’s attempted exorcism. It convinced a few reluctant members that he was interesting enough to join. At the same time, Kraus staged a test of romantic fidelity, hiring an actress she knew to try seduce Berliner. He didn’t stray.

In early November 1999, Berliner was accepted into the New Situationists as a “junior” member and Kraus’s assistant, specializing in Negative Recruitment. They threw a party for him at the group’s headquarters; all the members attended in masks. Some wore wigs, long gloves, or cowls to hide the color of their hair or skin. Kraus wore a purple mask in the shape of a unicorn head and an elaborate horned headdress. Berliner’s mask was red. The loud and lavish party lasted all night. Kraus pulled Berliner into her personal rooms for a quick tryst, then they rejoined the party to dance and drink champagne.

At the party, Kraus introduced Berliner to David Wilson. Unconcerned about protecting his identity, and lacking Kraus and Berliner’s flair for the theatrical, he didn’t wear a mask. Physically, Wilson was an unimpressive man: short, slightly hunched from years of sitting in front of a computer, and graying early. He was nearsighted but had a face-shape that rejected nearly every style of glasses. Round glasses were too small, rectangular glasses were too long, and the square-ish Wayfarers that had recently come back into style made him look like he was trying too hard. He wore a pair of tortoise-shell Wayfarers anyway. He took a picture with masked Kraus and Berliner. Although the picture from the party doesn’t show it, the three of them oddly look like they could be related: big eyes, dark hair, pale skin, and big smiles with large teeth. Lay pictures of Wilson, Kraus, and Berliner side to side and it will look like you’re assembling a family photo album.

During these early days, the New Situationists focused on entertainment and aesthetics. Like the Situationists before them, they wanted to inject playfulness and fun into their droll, serious lives.
Berliner immediately began participating in the New Situationists’ aesthetic activities as they attempted to interact with Chicago psychogeographically, in the style of Debord and the SI.

Because of their secrecy and their (possibly?) relatively small numbers, the New Situationists didn’t spark any musical or visual art movements, even on a local level. They either didn’t make much art or it burned in the fire that eventually destroyed their headquarters. They published a few pamphlets or zines without the words “Situationist” or “New Situationist” on them, with unsigned articles in a style both borrowed from the Situationists and helpful in protecting their identities. Some of the articles were reverent histories of Chicago architectural topics; some were personal essays about the L or a particular building in Chicago. They also wrote scathing diatribes against traffic and urban congestion, which they blamed for most of society’s ills. The contemporary urban architect’s tactics, they argued, hemmed people into capitalism-directed movements through an urban area, with pedestrians and drivers diverted to the routes that would pass the most billboards. This was essentially undiluted Situationist rhetoric. The unsigned, photocopied zines didn’t attract any attention, but were for a short time available for purchase at a local independent bookstore called Quimby’s.

Following the path the Situationists had paved, the New Situationists began focusing on politics rather than aesthetics after a few years of existence. In 2000, without revealing their identities, they helped organize and secretly fund a number of far-left political causes and candidates, mostly focusing on social issues, the politics of intellectual property, and creative freedom as it related to the Internet. However, after the events of September 11, 2001, their politics took a radical turn.

They planned what they believed would be a “low-risk, zero-casualty” act of domestic terrorism, to prove that “domestic terrorism was as much of a threat as foreign terrorism and that terrorism itself wasn’t an act of war between nations, but could be a zero-casualty
act of social change within a nation.”
^a
They decided to detonate bombs in eleven L stations across the city. The crippling of the L, which they called the “arms and hands of Chicago,” was intended to mimic the wound New York City received when the Twin Towers fell, to literally stop the city’s movements. In a declaration of intention sent to the
Chicago Tribune
the night of the bombings, the New Situationists insisted, “We revel in the beauty of this city and her infrastructure, and the destruction of this infrastructure, which we hold so dear, shows how absolutely necessary we believe this demonstration to be.”
^b

According to Kraus’s testimony, “sometime in May” she and ten other members of the New Situationists were separately informed their involvement was suspected. By the time her compatriots looped in Kraus, every detail had already been planned for 3:15 a.m. on Monday, June 18. The New Situationist leaders had chosen stations that would be closed at that time.

Sometime after 10 p.m. on June 17, Kraus and the ten other New Situationist bombers met with leaders in the New Situationist headquarters. During this meeting and for the rest of the long night, they all wore ski masks with holes for the eyes and mouth. Kraus’s ski mask was dark pink, which looked black enough in the dark. She hadn’t lost her Situationist instinct that play was as important as politics.

At the headquarters, Kraus received a backpack full of plastic explosives. No one told her where they sourced them. She was told that an “advance team” had been deployed to disable the alarm systems and unlock the doors. She was instructed to enter a particular door at her assigned station, drop her backpack and set the bomb to
detonate, then pull the fire alarm to clear out any security guards or stray homeless. According to Kraus, she was told that there wouldn’t be any security guards or homeless people; she was told pulling the fire alarm was just a precaution. The bombers planned to reconvene at the headquarters by no later than 4 a.m.

They believed their plan was simple and in its simplicity, doable.

Kraus’s evening began according to plan. She walked to her station, dropped her bag, and pulled the fire alarm—but then Kraus noticed a security guard passed out at her desk, unmoving despite the noise. Kraus spent several moments trying to wake her, only running at the last moment. Kraus managed to escape the bomb’s blast radius, but only barely. The force of the explosion knocked her to the pavement; she landed on her chin, breaking her front two teeth. The police found her bloody and wailing. They arrested her on the spot. Safe in their headquarters, the rest of the New Situationists escaped notice as police tried to contain the mass chaos.

When questioned that evening, Kraus told the arresting officers, senior detectives, and the District Attorney that she would give them everything she knew, then claimed to know very little. Kept in an interrogation room for twelve hours, her jaw swollen and aching, she repeated the same facts over and over again: she didn’t know the names or faces of any New Situationists, except David Wilson and Nicolas Berliner; Berliner and Wilson didn’t participate in planning the bombing and were completely unaware of the plans; she didn’t participate in planning the bombing but did what her superiors told her; she didn’t know the names of her superiors; she didn’t know the faces of her superiors; she didn’t know what they wanted; she didn’t know where they were. She ate three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, drank three cans of Diet Coke, and took four bathroom breaks. She waited until the eighth hour of her interrogation to ask to speak to an attorney.

The
Chicago Tribune
sent the manifesto they received to the CPD and published it alongside the report of the bombings. The CPD
arrested Wilson and Berliner. Wilson lawyered up immediately and refused to say anything except “I didn’t have anything to do with that.” Panicking, Berliner talked a lot, but the more he said the more it became clear to the detectives and the DA that he had no information. Berliner’s mother and grandmother provided an alibi, as did the classmate who had stayed up with him past 4 a.m., playing
Halo 2
over the Internet. Wilson had spent the night at his girlfriend’s apartment, which had a doorman and security cameras. The detectives wanted to charge both Berliner and Wilson anyway, but the DA decided to focus on Kraus.