VOL. CLXIII . . . No.

56,595 2014 The New York Times NEWYORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 2014
Late Edition
Today, sun with some clouds, a bit
warmer, high 81. Tonight, cloudy,
shower late, low 66. Tomorrow,
clouds and sun, a shower or storm,
high 83. Weather map, Page C8.
$2.50
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
AUSTIN, Tex. A grand jury
indicted Gov. Rick Perry on two
felony counts on Friday, charging
that he abused his power last
year when he tried to pressure
the district attorney here, a Dem-
ocrat, to step down by threat-
ening to cut off state financing to
her office.
The indictment left Mr. Perry, a
Republican, the first Texas gover-
nor in nearly 100 years to face
criminal charges and presented a
major roadblock to his presiden-
tial ambitions at the very time
that he had been showing signs of
making a comeback.
Grand jurors in Travis County
charged Mr. Perry with abusing
his official capacity and coercing
a public servant, according to Mi-
chael McCrum, the special pros-
ecutor assigned to the case.
The long-simmering case has
centered on Mr. Perrys veto
power as governor. His critics as-
serted that he used that power as
leverage to try to get an elected
official Rosemary Lehmberg,
the district attorney in Travis
County to step down after her
arrest on a drunken-driving
charge last year. Ms. Lehmberg
is Austins top prosecutor and
oversees a powerful public cor-
ruption unit that investigates
state, local and federal officials;
its work led to the 2005 indict-
ment of a former Republican con-
gressman, Tom DeLay, on
charges of violating campaign fi-
nance laws.
Following Ms. Lehmbergs ar-
rest, Mr. Perry and his aides
threatened to veto $7.5 million in
state funding for the public cor-
ruption unit in her office unless
she resigned. The governor fol-
lowed through on his threat, veto-
ing the money by stating that he
could not support continued
state funding for an office with
TEXAS GOVERNOR
INDICTED IN CASE
ALLEGING ABUSES
VETOING A FOES FUNDING
Charges Against Perry
Interrupt Presidential
Ambitions
Continued on Page A14
By REED ABELSON
and ERIC LICHTBLAU
BALTIMORE The ordinary
looking office building in a sub-
urb of Baltimore gives no hint of
the high-tech detective work go-
ing on inside. A $100 million sys-
tem churns through complicated
medical claims, searching for
suspicious patterns and posting
the findings on a giant screen.
Hundreds of miles away in a
strip mall north of Miami, more
than 60 people prosecutors,
F.B.I. agents, health care investi-
gators, paralegals and even a fo-
rensic nurse sort through doc-
uments and telephone logs look-
ing for evidence of fraudulent
Medicare billing. A warehouse in
the back holds fruits of their ef-
forts: wheelchairs, boxes of knee
braces and other medical devices
that investigators say amount to
props for false claims.
The Obama administrations
declared war on health care
fraud, costing some $600 million a
year, has a remarkable new look
in places like Baltimore and Mi-
ami. But even with the fancy
computers and expert teams, the
government is not close to de-
feating the fraudsters. And even
the effort designed to combat the
fraud may be in large part to
blame.
An array of outside contractors
used by the government is poorly
managed, rife with conflicts of in-
terest and vulnerable to political
winds, according to interviews
with current and former govern-
ment officials, contractors and
experts inside and outside of the
administration. Authority and re-
sponsibilities among the contrac-
tors are often unclear and in com-
petition with one another. Private
companies like insurers and
technology companies have
responsibility for enforcement,
often with little government over-
sight.
Fraud and systematic over-
charging are estimated at rough-
ly $60 billion, or 10 percent, of
Pervasive Medicare Fraud Proves Hard to Stop
Effort to Curb Loss of
$60 Billion Is Facing
Serious Problems
Continued on Page A3
By TATIANA SCHLOSSBERG
Rose-gold light was falling onto
Jamaica Bay and sea gulls
passed overhead on another
beautiful morning at Floyd Ben-
nett Field in Brooklyn, a far reach
of New York City mostly devoid
of New Yorkers and cars.
It was a perfect setting, then,
for learning how to drive a gar-
bage truck, which is why some of
the worlds least graceful vehi-
cles were groaning and screech-
ing their way through a narrow
trail of orange traffic cones.
Nearby, where Sanitation De-
partment trainees were learning
how to both load the trucks and
dump them, the air was filled
with sounds familiar to any New
Yorker the crashing of cans
and crushing of garbage in the
early morning hours, so loud it
might as well be happening in-
side ones bedroom.
Hey! an instructor called out
to his students. You have to
make sure the hoppers closed
before you drive off!
Police academies are famous
enough to have earned their own
movie franchise, and stories
about firefighters learning how to
slide down a firehouse pole as a
JAKE NAUGHTON/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Recruits being taught last month at the training academy for New Yorks Sanitation Department.
At This Academy, the Curriculum Is Garbage
Continued on Page A20
This article is by Tanzina Vega,
Timothy Williams and Erik Eck-
holm.
FERGUSON, Mo. One day
after roiling tensions over the po-
lice shooting of a black teenager
here began to subside, emotions
flared anew on Friday as the po-
lice identified the officer involved
but also released evidence that
the victim was a suspect in a con-
venience store robbery moments
before being shot.
The manner in which the police
here released the information,
which included a 19-page police
report on the robbery but no new
details about the shooting, led to
the spectacle of dueling police
news conferences, one led by a
white officer who seemed ill at
ease and defensive, and the other
dominated by a charismatic
black officer who expressed soli-
darity with the crowd even as he
pleaded for peace.
The white officer, Thomas
Jackson, the police chief in Fer-
guson, gave a series of incom-
plete accounts that sowed confu-
sion about whether the officer
who shot the teenager knew he
was a suspect in the robbery. The
black officer, Capt. Ronald S.
Johnson of the Missouri State
Highway Patrol, expressed his
displeasure with how the infor-
mation had been released.
I would have liked to have
been consulted, he said pointed-
ly about the pairing of the shoot-
ers identity with the robbery ac-
cusation.
All week, community members
had demanded the name of the
officer who killed Michael Brown,
18, last Saturday, but when it fi-
nally came, it was accompanied
by surveillance videotapes that
appeared to show Mr. Brown
shoving a store clerk aside as he
stole a box of cigarillos.
Mr. Browns family, their law-
yer and others in the community
expressed disgust, accusing the
police of trying to divert attention
from the central issue the un-
explained shooting of an un-
armed young man.
It is smoke and mirrors, said
Benjamin L. Crump, a lawyer for
the Brown family, of the robbery
allegations. Nothing, based on
the facts before us, justifies the
execution-style murder by this
police officer in broad daylight.
The videotapes seemed to con-
tradict the image portrayed by
Mr. Browns family of a gentle
teenager opposed to violence and
on his way to college.
Captain Johnson, who grew up
in the area and had been brought
in by the governor on Thursday
to restore peace after days of
confrontations between demon-
strators and the police in riot
gear and military-style vehicles,
said he had not been told that the
authorities planned to release the
video of the robbery along with
the name of the officer. But he
sought to calm people down, say-
ing, In our anger, we have to
make sure that we dont burn
down our own house.
Captain Johnson won over
Dueling Police Statements
As Anger Rises in Missouri
Officials Identify Officer in Shooting and
Say Victim Was Suspect in Robbery
Continued on Page A12
Tools of War in Counties Across the U.S.
State and local police departments, like the one in Ferguson, Mo., get some of their military-style
equipment through a free Defense Department program created in the early 1990s. Below are
some examples of equipment obtained by agencies in a selection of counties. Page A13.
M113 ARMORED
PERSONNEL CARRIER
Richland County, S.C.
BELL UH-1 HUEY
Stephens County, Okla.
BEECHCRAFT C-12
San Bernardino County, Calif.
BELL OH-58C KIOWA
New Hanover County, N.C.
SEA KING
Los Angeles County
HUGHES TH-55
Maricopa County, Ariz.
MINE-RESISTANT AMBUSH
PROTECTED VEHICLE
Benton County, Ark.
CASSPIR ARMORED VEHICLE
Pinal County, Ariz.
M-16 RIFLE
Collier County, Fla.
M-14 RIFLE
Hampden County, Mass.
M-79 GRENADE LAUNCHER
Hartford County
C-23 CARGO PLANE
Randolph County, Ark.
Source: Department of Defense THE NEW YORK TIMES
LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS
LISTENING Capt. Ronald John-
son built a rapport with Fergu-
son, Mo., residents. Page A13.
By PETER BAKER
WASHINGTON In this sum-
mer of global tumult, the debate
in Washington essentially boils
down to two opposite positions:
It is all President Obamas fault,
according to his critics; no, it is
not, according to his supporters,
because these are events beyond
his control.
Americans often think of their
president as an all-powerful fig-
ure who can command the tides
of history and presidents have
encouraged this image over the
years because the perception it-
self can be a form of power. But
as his critics have made the case
that Mr. Obamas mistakes have
fueled the turmoil in places like
Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, the pres-
ident has increasingly argued
that his power to shape these
seismic forces is actually limited.
Apparently, he said in frus-
tration the other day, people
have forgotten that America, as
the most powerful country on
earth, still does not control every-
thing around the world.
While as a statement of fact
Mr. Obamas assertion may be
self-evident, it was seen by ad-
versaries as a cop-out and even
by more sympathetic analysts as
a revealing moment for a presi-
dent whiplashed by international
instability.
At least since World War II,
presidents have been unwilling to
discuss deficiencies in capability
because theyre expected to do
Continued on Page A9
NEWS ANALYSIS
As World Boils,
Fingers Point
Obamas Way
By CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE and ANNE BARNARD
THE HAGUE In 1943, Henk
Zanoli took a dangerous train
trip, slipping past Nazi guards
and checkpoints to smuggle a
Jewish boy from Amsterdam to
the Dutch village of Eemnes.
There, the Zanoli family, already
under suspicion for resisting the
Nazi occupation, hid the boy in
their home for two years. The boy
would be the only member of his
family to survive the Holocaust.
Seventy-one years later, on
July 20, an Israeli airstrike flat-
tened a house in the Gaza Strip,
killing six of Mr. Zanolis rela-
tives by marriage. His grand-
niece, a Dutch diplomat, is mar-
ried to a Palestinian economist,
Ismail Ziadah, who lost three
brothers, a sister-in-law, a neph-
ew and his fathers first wife in
the attack.
On Thursday, Mr. Zanoli, 91,
whose father died in a Nazi camp,
went to the Israeli Embassy in
The Hague and returned a medal
he received honoring him as one
of the Righteous Among the Na-
tions non-Jews honored by Is-
rael for saving Jews during the
Holocaust. In an anguished letter
to the Israeli ambassador to the
Netherlands, he described the
terrible price his family had paid
for opposing Nazi tyranny.
My sister lost her husband,
who was executed in the dunes of
The Hague for his involvement in
the resistance, he wrote. My
brother lost his Jewish fiance
who was deported, never to re-
turn.
Mr. Zanoli continued, Against
this background, it is particularly
shocking and tragic that today,
four generations on, our family is
faced with the murder of our kin
in Gaza. Murder carried out by
the State of Israel.
His act crystallizes the moral
debate over Israels military air
and ground assault in the Gaza
Strip, in which about 2,000 peo-
ple, a majority of them civilians,
have been killed. Israel says the
strikes are aimed at Hamas mil-
itants who fire rockets at Israeli
cities and have dug a secret net-
work of tunnels into Israel.
Mr. Zanoli transformed over
the decades from a champion to a
critic of the Israeli state, mirror-
ing a larger shift in Europe,
where anguish over the slaughter
of six million European Jews led
many to support the founding of
Israel in 1948 as a haven for Jews
worldwide.
But in the years since Israel oc-
Resisting Nazis, He Saw Need
For Israel. Now He Is Its Critic.
Continued on Page A10
The jihadist group
is pressing deeper
into Syria, regain-
ing territory it had
lost to more main-
stream Syrian in-
surgents. The re-
grouping could
limit efforts to top-
ple President Bashar al-Assad. PAGE A4
INTERNATIONAL A4-10
ISIS Rebounds
In Syria Much to the pleasure of hungry birds,
salmon are making a comeback in the
Columbia River in Oregon. Government
officials charged with making sure that
comeback is robust have a new plan to
protect the fish: shoot thousands of cor-
morants. PAGE A11
NATIONAL A11-14
Either Fish or Fowl
The Internet retail giant, facing intense
competition from companies like Net-
flix, has redoubled its investment in
television programming, hoping to at-
tract users to its Prime service. PAGE B1
BUSINESS DAY B1-7
Original Shows, by Amazon
Jules Feiff-
ers graphic
novel is not
only a trib-
ute to film
noir and de-
tective fic-
tion, but an
insightful
meditation
on female
identity. THIS WEEKEND
THE BOOK REVIEW
Kill My Mother
Gail Collins PAGE A19
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A18-19
Some makers of dietary supplements
are claiming to have a cure for Ebola,
health regulators said. PAGE A6
False Promises on Ebola
At Salzburg, Anna Netrebko and Plci-
do Domingo failed to lift Il Trovatore,
but Fierrabras soared. PAGE C1
ARTS C1-7
Challenges at Opera Festival
The Del Mar racetrack in California is
set to host the prestigious Breeders
Cup in 2017, but its summer meet has
been marred by a series of calamities,
including the deaths of five horses who
broke down on a newly installed turf
track in the first 30 races. PAGE D1
SPORTSSATURDAY D1-6
Trouble on the Turf
An upstate New York couple have been
charged with kidnapping two Amish
girls, whose one-day disappearance
prompted an extensive search and na-
tional media attention. PAGE A15
NEW YORK A15-17, 20
Arrests in Abduction of 2 Girls
U(D54G1D)y+%!%!]!=!&
C MY K Nxxx,2014-08-16,A,001,Bs-BK,E2