In May 2018, Darren Marble was attending a cryptocurrency conference in New York City when he discovered he had become a victim of a new and financially devastating form of crime. The first sign that something was amiss was when Marble, an executive producer for a streaming series, started having issues with his mobile phone. He couldn’t connect to email, or send a text. It wasn’t until later that night when he got back to his hotel room, logged into the wifi and investigated further that his wo
In May 2018, Darren Marble was attending a cryptocurrency conference in New York City when he discovered he had become a victim of a new and financially devastating form of crime.
The first sign that something was amiss was when Marble, an executive producer for a streaming series, started having issues with his mobile phone. He couldn’t connect to email, or send a text.
It wasn’t until later that night when he got back to his hotel room, logged into the wifi and investigated further that his worst fears were realized. His crypto wallet had been drained.
“I'd lost $100,000 of cryptocurrency instantaneously,” he said. “I just remember thinking, ‘This can't be real.’”
Marble called his wife in a panic, feeling a sense of hopelessness and shame as he explained what had happened. The money was gone, he could see it had been transferred into other people’s wallets, but he couldn’t tell who those wallets belonged to, because the whole point of cryptocurrency was its anonymity.
“I just remember having this sinking feeling in my heart. I felt guilty, I felt ashamed, I felt naive, and I felt embarrassed,” he said.
“Then I wondered, ‘What's gonna happen next?’ Who do you call when you get hacked for cryptocurrency?”
Chart the rise and fall of Joel Ortiz in our brand new documentary – The Crypto Bandit:
The technique involves a hacker tricking or bribing a cellphone carrier employee to redirect the victim's phone number to a different phone, giving the hacker access to all their calls and messages, allowing them to reset their passwords and, ultimately, empty their accounts.
The hacker holding the phone that was used to steal Marble’s crypto was Joel Ortiz: an 18-year-old college student who, from his mother’s Boston apartment, would go on to steal more than $7.5 million in this way.
Ortiz, an isolated teen whose only social connections were online, would go on to splurge large amounts of the money he stole from high-value crypto investors on a lavish luxury lifestyle, a world removed from his modest upbringing as the son of a disabled, immigrant solo mother.
The story of Ortiz’s remarkable crime wave, and the team of investigators who would eventually bring him to justice, is told in The Crypto Bandit – a new documentary in VICE’s Cowboy Kings of Crypto series.
“Ortiz was a brainy guy,” said Erin West, deputy district attorney in Santa Clara County, California, where Ortiz would eventually be charged, becoming the first person sentenced for “sim swap” offending in the US.
“He graduated as valedictorian of his class and got a scholarship to UMass. And we know that he had skills that were really usable in this way. He exploited a vulnerability that I don't think the rest of the nation was really thinking much about.”
Known online by the handle @0, Ortiz operated as part of a hacker ring, working with online associates to pull off his audacious crimes. Investigators say he and others in the gang targeted individuals publicly associated with the crypto world, drawing up lists of rich potential targets in the hope of catching a “whale.”
With one victim in particular, Ortiz and his fellow hackers would hit the jackpot. Saswata Basu is a Silicon Valley-based founder of a company that raised capital from the crypto market, who would also find himself a victim of Ortiz’s scams.
Like Marble, he would discover he was being hacked when his phone started displaying messages about his passwords being changed. But the scale of the theft from Basu would dwarf Marble’s losses.
“There was one wallet… which was hacked,” he told VICE. “The amount was about $5 million.”
Ortiz flaunted his new wealth on social media: buying Gucci outfits and designer goods, and renting luxury mansions in Los Angeles to party in.
“If you're an 18-year-old kid and you just stole $5 million, what would you do with that money?” said Samy Tarazi, a criminal investigator in the Santa Clara district attorney’s office. Tarazi was a member of REACT, an elite taskforce that had been formed in California to tackle this kind of cybercrime.
“The answer is always something dumb. He had traveled from Boston to Hollywood and had rented out Airbnbs.”
Ortiz’s habit of posting his wild lifestyle on social media would only help investigators, and he was eventually arrested at LAX airport, as he prepared to board a flight to Europe. In April 2019, he was given a 10-year sentence after pleading no contest to eight counts of identity theft and computer crimes. He is currently serving his sentence at Centinela Prison in California, and is due to be released in 2028.
But the bulk of the stolen millions in crypto remains unaccounted for, having been laundered by his gang in a process that makes the funds virtually untraceable.
Tarazi and West said that, when arrested, Ortiz showed them about $250,000 in cryptocurrency, and had probably blown about the same amount in his excessive spending.
“There was a huge gap between what he could account for and what we knew he took,” said West.
For Marble, there was an unexpected silver lining. Long after the theft, he received an unexpected email from the High Court in Ireland, informing him that one of Ortiz’s co-conspirators–a Dublin-based hacker named Conor Freeman–had been arrested, and the money that had been stolen from him recovered. Freeman was sentenced in November 2020 to two years and 11 months in prison.
“It was another, just surreal moment,” said Marble, who was returned $90,000 of the stolen crypto. “I was basically made whole right there.”
But most victims weren’t so lucky. The whereabouts of millions of dollars stolen by the hacker gang remained a mystery, said Tarazi.
“We don't know if they gave it to trusted third parties we haven't identified, [or] they have it buried in a forest somewhere and they'll get it when they get out of prison,” he said. “I don't know.”
What started as a hobby for Stuart Humphryes has turned into a social media behemoth. Since July 2020, Humphryes has been enhancing spectacular early color photographs to an adoring following. And after much clamoring, he finally has a book out: The Colors of Life: Early Color Photography Enhanced by Stuart Humphreys. Humphryes, who works in the planning department of his local council by day, found his niche “by chance,” he says, by merging his background in colorizing film and restoring black
Humphryes, who works in the planning department of his local council by day, found his niche “by chance,” he says, by merging his background in colorizing film and restoring black and white photos. “I get enormous satisfaction from doing it, and enormous satisfaction from the pleasure that it gives people.” Today, he has over 200,000 followers on X. “It's not just passive—people tend to comment and ask questions. They're engaged, so that engages me.”
He’s not adding color to black and white photos, as people often assume, but rather enhancing the scans of faded early color photographs known as “autochromes,” which date back to the early 20th century and needed about 30 times the exposure time compared with black and white photos of the era. “A lot of people have black and white photographs from the 1970s,” Humphryes says. “They don't realize that people have been taking color photos since 1861.”
When taking autochromes, Humphryes says, early experimenters would sandwich a layer of dye-tinted potato starch between glass plates, which “acted like a filter.” When the autochromes were processed, the thousands of individual grains of potato starch show in the photo, “like a pointillist painting.”
“So if you zoom into an autochrome, the image completely breaks up. They only work from a distance, because as you go into them, the dots get bigger and bigger, and there’s no detail,” Humphryes says. “I use a computer code to average out the difference between the dots that kind of smooths it out—it gets rid of the dottiness. That way, people on their mobile devices can zoom right into the photo, and it doesn't break up. It makes that sort of old photo technology user-friendly. It creates detail that wouldn't be there.”
Autochromes have other faults, though. “Over the century, they fade and they crack and split. The balance of the dyes changes, so they become either quite heavily yellowed or quite heavily blue. The reds degrade quickest. I use the digital scans to rebalance the colors, clean them up, and get rid of all the dirt and the noise. I use some algorithms, computer software to clean them up and look like modern digital images,” Humphryes says. “Everything is original, but it's just kind of boosted to the maximum degree.”
Shackleton's Endurance with Frank Hurley on the ice, 1915
The new book showcasing his efforts,The Colors of Life, is available via the German publisher Gestalten. Humphryes says the book’s conception was “a war of attrition”—endless followers kept on at him about doing a book. When Gestalten got in touch, he was finally open to the idea.
Does he feel a sense of kind of duty to the people depicted in the photos, by bringing them to the present day? “I’m always minded that we ourselves, you and I, are ultimately going to end up being faces in photographs in somebody's drawer in 100 years’ time. They were just as alive and real as we are now. But they exist purely as this static image.
“If I can make people connect to them and make them more real––people tend to think that what I do with the photographs, makes them seem more contemporary, like people they might see in the street—then that gives them sort of an empathy and an emotional connection to them that they wouldn't otherwise have. I think that's really lovely and very important,” Humphryes says.
“Some of the photographs I've enhanced, I've had descendants message me, I've had somebody say they were a great niece of somebody in one of the photographs. And that is amazing to me, that I can bring that long past person back to life for thousands of people to see and connect with.”
Below, see a selection of his work.
Kyoto Japan - Noh theater from the play Mochizuki, playing Ozawa-no-Tomofusa by Staphane Passet, 1912
Boy with parasol (unknown photographer), 1910
Portrait of a Hopi Snake Clan priest in Arizona by Franklin Price Knott (first published in 1916 in National Geographic), 1912
Damascus, Syria. portrait of an Arabian Emir by Jules Gervais Courtellemont, 1925
Senegalese soldiers in the French Army at Saint-Ulrich, France by Paul Castelnau, 1917
Woman in Tunisian Dress, by Jules Gervais-Courtellemont, 1920
There are many stumbling blocks on the racetrack to nuclear fusion, the reaction at the core of the sun that combines atoms to make energy: Generating more energy than it takes to power the reactors, developing reactor-proof building materials, keeping the reactor free from impurities, and restraining that fuel within it, to name a few. Now, researchers from Princeton University and its Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have developed an AI model that could solve that last problem. This model
There are many stumbling blocks on the racetrack to nuclear fusion, the reaction at the core of the sun that combines atoms to make energy: Generating more energy than it takes to power the reactors, developing reactor-proof building materials, keeping the reactor free from impurities, and restraining that fuel within it, to name a few.
Now, researchers from Princeton University and its Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have developed an AI model that could solve that last problem. This model predicts, and then figures out how to avoid, plasma becoming unstable and escaping the strong magnetic fields that hold it inside certain donut-shaped reactors. They published their findings Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Donut-shaped tokamak reactors rely on magnets to squeeze plasma particles close together and keep them constantly spinning around a ring, creating a lasting fusion reaction. They’re one of the front-runners in designs for a practical fusion reactor. But if there’s one little disruption to the magnetic field lines running through the plasma, the delicate balance keeping it all contained gets out of whack: The plasma escapes the magnets’ clutches and the reaction ends.
Chijin Xiao, a plasma physicist at the University of Saskatchewan who wasn’t involved in the study, explained that these instabilities can lead to catastrophic consequences. “When the plasma stops operating, there are several risks: one is that all the energy stored in the plasma is going to be released as thermal energy and may damage the wall of the reactor," she said. "More importantly, a sudden change in the [magnetic] current can introduce a great deal of force on the reactor that can really destroy the device."
Xiao added that one of the biggest tokamak reactors around today, ITER in France, is only designed to withstand a few of these plasma disruptions before the whole machine has to be repaired—a huge expense. The goal is to catch instabilities while they’re small and intervene.
The Princeton lab’s model can predict so-called tearing mode instabilities 300 milliseconds before they happen. It doesn’t sound like a lot of heads-up, but it’s enough time to get the plasma under control, their study shows.
Researchers tested the algorithm on a real reactor, the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego. They saw that their AI-based system could control the power being pumped into the reactor and the shape of the plasma to keep the swirling particles in check.
Co-author Azarakhsh Jalalvand said in a statement that the success of the AI model comes from the fact that it was trained on real data from previous fusion experiments, rather than theoretical physics models.
“We don’t teach the reinforcement learning model all of the complex physics of a fusion reaction,” Jalalvand said. “We tell it what the goal is—to maintain a high-powered reaction—what to avoid—a tearing mode instability—and the knobs it can turn to achieve those outcomes. Over time, it learns the optimal pathway for achieving the goal of high power while avoiding the punishment of an instability.”
The study is significant, said co-author Jaemin Seo, because previous studies have only been able to suppress tearing instabilities after they happen. “Our approach allows us to predict and avoid those instabilities before they ever appear.”
But tearing mode instabilities are just one of the ways plasma can become unhinged. There are dozens of ways a glob of plasma can wobble, bend, or break apart: like a kinked garden hose, a fan, or even a sausage.
Nevertheless, tearing instabilities are one of the biggest challenges on the way to boundless clean fusion energy. “Tearing mode instabilities are one of the major causes of plasma disruption, and they will become even more prominent as we try to run fusion reactions at the high powers required to produce enough energy,” said Seo. “They are an important challenge for us to solve.”
AI will play a large role in controlling and maintaining fusion reactions, Federico Felici, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology who wasn’t involved in the study, told Live Science. “There's a huge potential to unleash AI to get better control and to figure out how to operate such devices in a more effective way.” Felici and his team previously created an AI model to shape the plasma ring inside the Variable Configuration Tokamak.
The authors of the latest study describe their work as proof-of-concept at this stage and write in their paper that it’s still very much in the early stages of fine-tuning. They are hopeful, however, that it could be fine-tuned and eventually applied to other reactors, also to optimize the reaction or harvest the energy from it.
“Currently there’s experimental evidence to control those [plasma disruption] scenarios but those scenarios are so broad that with the current knowledge and data it’s still wait and see,” said Xiao.
The internet is deadlocked in a debate over Paul Verhoeven’s subversive 1997 sci-fi blockbuster Starship Troopers after a successful new video game inspired by the film, Helldivers 2, brought it back into public consciousness. For days, the argument raged between one group of people hailing the film as a satire of fascist jingoism—its intended message, according to Verhoeven—and people who see it as a failed critique of the Robert Heinlein book on which it’s very loosely based. To this latter gr
The internet is deadlocked in a debate over Paul Verhoeven’s subversive 1997 sci-fi blockbuster Starship Troopers after a successful new video game inspired by the film, Helldivers 2, brought it back into public consciousness.
For days, the argument raged between one group of people hailing the film as a satire of fascist jingoism—its intended message, according to Verhoeven—and people who see it as a failed critique of the Robert Heinlein book on which it’s very loosely based. To this latter group, Starship Troopers is indeed the product of a leftist director attempting to satirize the source material (Verhoeven famously tossed the book aside and dismissed it as “very right-wing”), but they argue that it ultimately still glorifies the film’s Aryan characters, their militarized society, and their fight against the supposedly inhuman bugs.
It’s futile to argue with people who have already decided to gleefully celebrate fascism, but having re-watched the film this weekend, there is one element that people on both sides ignore: its strange psychic subplot.
This puzzling inclusion, which wasn’t explicitly in the original novel, holds the key to the film’s message. Though it’s easy to miss amid the alien bug war, the psychic abilities in the film show that humans have a mysterious connection to the bugs and can communicate with them, but the film’s incurious fascist characters ultimately reject this strange and exciting potential in a pessimistic denouement.
What are the psychic powers in ‘Starship Troopers’?
Starship Troopers takes place amid a strange evolution of humanity: people are spontaneously developing psychic powers. Young civilians are screened for psychic abilities, and when they are detected, they are sent up the chain of military command. This is what happens to Neil Patrick Harris’ character, Carl Jenkins. “Who knows? Maybe it’s a new stage of human evolution,” Jenkins says just before psychically directing his pet ferret to attack his mother. He can’t do humans “yet,” he ominously tells the protagonist.
This is all, I think, meant to be taken at face value. It’s revealed later on that the alien bugs humanity is at war with—it’s stated in a news clip that people are colonizing their planets, leading to confrontation—are themselves psychic. In fact, their abilities are even more highly developed. The bugs operate via telepathic communication from a leader dubbed a Brain Bug, and they can even psychically control humans to do their bidding.
This is all fascinating to consider: These bugs, which seem so terrifying and alien, share a deep and mysterious connection with us in the form of an emerging telepathy which might just be our next step as a species. In fact, the human military is already inching towards a command-and-control structure that is similar to the bugs’. At a critical moment, Jenkins gives psychic instructions to the protagonist while in the field of battle.
Can humans and bugs communicate in ‘Starship Troopers’?
The film’s detractors argue that Verhoeven does not do a good enough job of showing that humans could ever communicate with or live alongside the bugs, and that any viewer who thinks this must be defective. They did not watch the film closely.
At the very end, Jenkins literally does communicate with the captured Brain Bug. “What’s it thinking, Colonel?” a commander asks Jenkins.
The telepathic Jenkins, dressed in SS-inspired attire, places his hand on the bug’s head. “It’s afraid,” he declares as a crowd of soldiers cheers.
This is unambiguous proof that humans can communicate with bugs, however crudely at first, and one would think that this kind of alien contact would be a watershed moment for humanity. Instead, the film cuts hard to a propaganda reel showing human scientists torturing the Brain Bug and gearing up to wage even more war.
That humanity could cross such an incredible threshold—psychic communication with an alien species—and only see it as an opportunity for more domination and war is profoundly depressing.
What is the message of ‘Starship Troopers’?
This, in a nutshell, is the film’s message. Humanity is going through an enigmatic and highly unnatural change, and these emerging psychic abilities and their connection to other species in the universe represent a profound mystery. But the fascist characters in the movie are at best totally incurious, and may even be afraid. After all, psychic abilities are suppressed among the population via early detection and immediate subsumption into the military.
At the end of the film, humanity’s potential for developing its abilities and flourishing among other species in the cosmos is unambiguously foreclosed by its militaristic, fascist society, and its need for all-out war on a convenient out group. The source of these powers is never explained, which is more a tragedy than a plot hole.
Now, someone might argue that this is cheating; that Verhoeven had to include some kind of psychic bullshit to give humanity a connection to the bugs, who are otherwise fearsome and strange. To this I say: Psychic abilities are not real, just like alien bugs are not real. This is all necessarily a commentary on our existing society with made-up parameters that are defined by the author of the work.
Verhoeven giving such strange-looking creatures a mysterious and in a way beautiful connection to humanity, which the fascists in the film reject or ignore, is not merely the point but also a stroke of brilliance that shows why the movie had held up nearly 30 years after its release.
Independent crypto journalist Tiffany Fong released what is believed to be the first photo of disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in prison on Monday evening. In the photo, Bankman-Fried—who appears to have lost weight and grown out his facial hair—stands alongside five other inmates with his hands gently clutching one another. The former CEO of crypto firm FTX and co-founder of trading firm Alameda Research has been living inside Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center since August, wh
Independent crypto journalist Tiffany Fong released what is believed to be the first photo of disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in prison on Monday evening. In the photo, Bankman-Fried—who appears to have lost weight and grown out his facial hair—stands alongside five other inmates with his hands gently clutching one another.
The former CEO of crypto firm FTX and co-founder of trading firm Alameda Research has been living inside Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center since August, when his bail was first revoked.He is currently awaiting sentencing after being found guilty on all seven charges related to the collapse of both firms, including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud, money laundering, and committed fraud.
In a video posted alongside the image, Fong said she obtained the photo of Bankman-Fried from one of the other men in the photo, who she referred to as “G Lock" and said was a "recent inmate." In an interview with Fong, G Lock said the photo was taken just before Christmas in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where the former crypto king is awaiting sentencing.
The interview provided a small window view into Bankman-Fried’s life in prison. G Lock said that Bankman-Friend has been not showering much, if at all, and had begun to look like a “toothpick” and “scruffier than a mother fucker.” However, he added,
Bankman-Fried had garnered a positive reputation during his short time around the other inmates. While “G Lock” did say Bankman-Friend was “weird as shit,” he added that he was considered a “good guy” that didn’t “snitch.” “Free Sam-Bankman,” G Lock said.
On Tuesday X briefly suspended an account belonging to Yulia Navalnaya, widow of the Russian opposition politician Alexei Nalavalny, who died in prison last week. Prior to the suspension, Navalnaya released a video on multiple social media platforms pledging to continue her late husband’s work to unseat Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the video, which advertised social media accounts on Instagram and X, Navalnaya said Putin was responsible for her husband’s death, and pledged to expose the
On Tuesday X briefly suspended an account belonging to Yulia Navalnaya, widow of the Russian opposition politician Alexei Nalavalny, who died in prison last week.
Prior to the suspension, Navalnaya released a video on multiple social media platforms pledging to continue her late husband’s work to unseat Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the video, which advertised social media accounts on Instagram and X, Navalnaya said Putin was responsible for her husband’s death, and pledged to expose the full details.
“We will definitely find out who exactly and how exactly committed this crime,” she said. “We will tell you their names and show you their faces.”
“I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny. I will continue to fight for our country. And I encourage you to stand by my side,” she said.
Navalnaya’s account on Instagram, where she shared the video, stayed up. On X, however, her account was suspended, sparking concern and outrage among the site’s users early on Tuesday morning. Soon after, the account was reinstated.
It’s not clear why the account was suspended and quickly restored. A notice on the page said it was banned due to violating X’s rules, without specifying which ones.
Screenshot of Navalnaya's suspended X account at 8:25 AM EST.
This isn’t the first time X has experienced this kind of incident; last month, the accounts of numerous high-profile journalists and leftists who are critical of X owner Elon Musk and Israel were suspended without explanation. Those accounts were eventually reinstated, and Musk blamed the suspensions on the platform’s automated spam detection systems.
Navalnaya’s X account was brand new and quickly gained nearly 100,000 followers, which could conceivably trip a spam system that is operating without appropriate oversight. After Musk paid $44 billion for X in 2022, he slashed its staff, including its moderation teams.
At the time of writing, Musk’s latest tweet is a bad joke about “extra-slutty olive oil.” Motherboard received a boilerplate automated response email from X after reaching out for comment about Navalnaya’s account.
The first deaths happened in August 2022, when 31-year-old Deshundra Tate and her 5-year-old daughter, Kendra, succumbed to a gas leak at the Sunset Village apartments in Cleveland, Mississippi. The next occurred only two months later, in October, when an explosion at an apartment complex in Arkansas killed three people: Wanda Bell-Freeman, 64, Eloise Childs, 71, and Kenneth Jackson, 63. The separate disasters transpired roughly 180 miles away from one another, but they had one thing in common:
The first deaths happened in August 2022, when 31-year-old Deshundra Tate and her 5-year-old daughter, Kendra, succumbed to a gas leak at the Sunset Village apartments in Cleveland, Mississippi. The next occurred only two months later, in October, when an explosion at an apartment complex in Arkansas killed three people: Wanda Bell-Freeman, 64, Eloise Childs, 71, andKenneth Jackson, 63.
The separate disasters transpired roughly 180 miles away from one another, but they had one thing in common: both took place in buildings owned and managed by The Millennia Companies, an Ohio-based mega-landlord that holds a sprawling portfolio of federally subsidized affordable housing across 26 states.
To tenants, the deaths were the most drastic manifestations of the dangerous circumstances that have plagued Millennia tenants for years. That same year, hundreds of tenants at Forest Cove, a Millennia complex in Atlanta, Georgia, were forced to vacate the premises due to mold, rats, roaches, termites, snakes, rotted floors, and more.
“Living in Forest Cove was a death trap,” 33-year-old Secoria Laney, who had to leave the apartment she lived in with her three children for almost a decade, told Motherboard.
In recent years, tenants at Millennia properties have begun to organize in hopes of improving their situation. For years, they have experienced leaking and caved-in ceilings, attempts to evict tenants with 10 days notice, and a lack of heat. Too often, they say, their requests for help have gone unanswered or been completely ignored.
From Millennia’s perspective, the company inherited problems left by the buildings’ previous owners. After it purchased the distressed buildings “with the sole intention” of “transforming them,” the company invested tens of millions of dollars into them, but not before the deaths in Mississippi and Arkansas, according to Isys Caffey-Horne, a representative from the public relations and crisis management firm representing Millennia.
“Living in Forest Cove was a death trap.”
Yet tenants who spoke to Motherboard said that the problems they faced under the previous owner, the nonprofit Global Ministries Foundation, grew worse under Millennia. Building conditions further deteriorated, and management became less responsive and slower to make repairs, tenants said. (Motherboard left a voicemail with Global Ministries Foundation hoping to speak with a representative, but never heard back, and an email sent to the company’s email address bounced back.)
“Millennia has spent upwards of $50 million rehabilitating these communities alone, ensuring the residents have access to decent, safe, and sanitary housing, and the instances mentioned were all prior to comprehensive rehabilitations and due to years of neglect of the prior owner,” Caffey-Horne told Motherboard over email in response to a request for comment detailing tenants' allegations.
Tenants at Forest Cove in Atlanta, Georgia, dealt with suboptimal conditions for years, they say. (Photo courtesy of the American Friends Service Committee)
As of last November, Mary Lloyd, a tenant of Sunset Village, was still smelling what seemed like gas to her. Lloyd told Motherboard that she reported it to management, who told her the smell was “sewage.”
Millennia told Motherboard that there was no gas leak in November, and any claims are "unfounded." Lloyd said that her trust in the company is so low that she's still concerned.
“Lying and denying, that’s what I know them for,” Lloyd said.
“These people are not making it up,” said Sharon Brown, who has been advocating for Millennia tenants as part of the Millennia Resistance Campaign in her home state of Mississippi, as well as in Memphis, where she now lives. “When you have the same people having the same issues in Mississippi, Alabama, New York, Texas, Oklahoma, then it’s a problem.”
But, Brown added, “If you have a certain amount of money or stature, it don’t matter what you do to the poor.”
At most privately owned rental properties in the United States, the onus is on tenants to make formal complaints to overwhelmed housing agencies, an imperfect system that can lead to retaliation against them by landlords.
Millennia should be different. Because the company receives federal subsidies to keep its rental properties affordable, Millennia falls under the regulatory purview of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD. Over the last decades, the government has decreased its reliance on traditional public housing, in which it owns and manages buildings, in favor of a growing reliance on “Section 8” vouchers that can be used in the private market, forcing tenants to search for housing amid limited options and landlords who refuse to rent to them.
The government has another free-ish market solution that in theory should be more stable for tenants, and this is where companies like Millennia come in: private landlords own and operate buildings and receive federal subsidies to keep entire developments affordable for low-income tenants. Unlike traditional Section 8, the subsidies are tied to the building, not the tenants. Tenants don’t have to shop around for housing, but they are also at the whims of landlords who still can evict them, and owners must cobble together financing for building-wide rehabilitations. As of 2023, there were 1.2 million people living in this type of housing, a population comparable to the size of Dallas, according to HUD.
But these units are also decreasing in number, as landlords increasingly opt out of the program because it’s not profitable enough, and the aging housing stock further deteriorates, according to a 2018 HUD report.
If HUD does end a contract at developments like those Millennia owns, that subsidy is lost forever, because the federal government has stopped creating new project-based subsidies of this type. This is an undesirable outcome for tenants who still hope to live affordably in their neighborhoods.
But advocates say that the federal agency has other tools within its broad authority that could be better utilized when dealing with problematic landlords, including issuing fines, forcing the owner to replace management, and transferring subsidies to another property and owner. It took such actions against Global Ministries Foundation in 2016, when it put a court in charge of some of its properties and canceled subsidies for others. Global Ministries Foundation then sold its entire troubled Section 8 housing stock of hundreds of apartments, and HUD looked for a buyer that could assemble the needed capital to make repairs. That buyer was Millennia.
Since then, tenant organizations and housing advocates have come to believe that the agency has failed to hold Millennia accountable for failing to make those repairs, and often responded to complaints related to the company by rerouting them to regional offices, or worse.
“They didn't hold Millennia accountable for anything Milllenia did. I feel like HUD was in Millennia’s pocket.”
Bridgett Simmons, a staff attorney with National Housing Law Project, said tenants have reported conditions like mold, leaking roofs and infestations to HUD, only to have the federal agency redirect them to Millennia management instead of independently investigating. Other times, HUD has questioned the veracity of evidence provided by tenants, including photos, while taking Millennia at its word, she added.
“HUD is failing to exercise its authority to require these owners to bring these properties back into compliance,” said Simmons.
As a result, many tenants have come to blame not just Millennia for the tragedies tenants have endured, but also HUD. “They didn't hold Millennia accountable for anything Millennia did,” Millennia tenant Laney said. “I feel like HUD was in Millennia’s pocket.”
In particular, the deaths in Mississippi and Arkansas loom large in the minds of the company’s tenants.
“Those deaths are on HUD as well,” said Brown, whose sister knew the Tate family. “If they had been doing what they’re supposed to be doing, that wouldn’t have happened.”
The ongoing fight to improve the lives of Millennia tenants illustrates how a crisis of oversight adds to the turmoil facing low-income housing across the country. As the federal government inks contracts with sprawling private landlords to house the poorest Americans, it has been accused of failing to hold those owners adequately accountable for hazardous and sometimes deadly conditions.
Sarah Saadian, the senior vice president of public policy at the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, said that HUD’s inadequate oversight of privately owned housing has long been an issue.
In Saadian’s estimation, part of the reason is related to the lack of private-market affordable housing: If HUD either cancels a contract or pressures a landlord to do substantial rehabilitation, then it has to relocate tenants. To do that, HUD has to convert rent vouchers from a type that is tied to the apartment to one that the tenant can use anywhere. But there is little affordable housing for tenants to move to, and private landlords routinely discriminate against tenants with federal housing vouchers, making the process logistically complicated and burdensome.
HUD said it is trying to do more for tenants and recently expanded staffing to increase responsiveness to complaints, according to HUD Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily Housing Ethan Handelman.
“It is unacceptable for people to live in unsafe conditions that are detrimental to tenants' health,” Handelman told Motherboard over email.
In the case of Millennia, Handelman told Motherboard that HUD found the company mismanaged tenant security deposits and “taxpayer funds” to provide housing assistance, and the agency is now “demanding repayment of misallocated funds” and seeking financial penalties in court.
Millennia told Motherboard that it “understands the significance of HUD’s concerns” but that it had been working with HUD since 1992 to preserve affordable housing. It said it had “no HUD findings or outstanding issues” when it first agreed to purchase the Global Ministries Foundation portfolio in 2017.
In recent decades, federal spending on housing assistance has decreased to just a fraction of what it once was, and Handelman implied the agency needs more money if it is to resolve some of the problems at properties where it has contracts.
“HUD has requested additional funding from Congress to adequately address the long-standing need to improve conditions in HUD-assisted properties,” he said.
But critics said the agency failed to adequately investigate Millennia’s alleged mismanagement as it took over the portfolio it inherited from Global Ministries Foundation. Merely temporarily suspending Millennia from signing new affordable housing contracts is not enough, they believe, because the company still has hundreds of existing contracts with HUD.
Among the 280 properties Millennia took over from Global Ministries Foundation were the apartments at Forest Cove in the Thomasville Heights neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia, where tenants dealt with roaches, termites, and even snakes in the building. People reported breathing problems related to mold, and floorboards in some units became so rotted that people fell through them, tenants and housing advocates told Motherboard.
Forest Cove, which is privately owned and federally subsidized, has had substandard conditions for more than a decade, long before Millennia took over, the City of Atlanta said. But tenants said conditions got worse after Millennia took over.
Crystal Jones, a 38-year-old former Forest Cove resident, spent years struggling with broken appliances, rats, and a lack of heat. She put in requests for maintenance with Millennia, but when Jones checked on the status of her requests, she would find there was no record of them, she said. The situation became so dangerous that a social worker warned that her children would be removed from her care if she wasn’t able to move to a safer apartment, she said.
Another former resident, Yolanda Tamplin, told Motherboard she and her children had to jump over broken stairs inside their apartment and that they had no working stove for at least three years. When it did work, rats would immediately come for the food if she walked away from it.
Secoria Laney said she also dealt with rats while living at Forest Cove. If she set a rat trap, she could usually catch two or three an hour, she said. More concerning to her, though, was her boarded-up windows. If there had been a fire, she would have had a hard time escaping.
When Millennia took over as the property manager of Forest Cove in 2017—it would not complete the purchase of the development outright until 2021—the company promised to do better than its predecessor, according to Tamplin.
“HUD was just kind of twiddling their thumbs.”
Millennia’s attorneys later said in a legal complaint that the company “did not intend on taking over management of the properties prior to closing on [financing] for each property,” but agreed to be a property manager at Forest Cove only because Global Ministries Foundation “walked off site.”
But when Tamplin started to call to request necessary repairs, Millennia failed to send anyone, she said. “They made all these promises and then it just got worse,” Tamplin said. Millennia did not respond to specific questions about repair requests, but said that problems at Forest Cove were the result of actions by the city that made it hard for the company to secure financing.
Tenants organized meetings with HUD asking for the organization to intervene, but the conversations did little to change the situation, said Foluke Nunn, an organizer with the American Friends Service Committee, a faith-based charity.
“HUD was just kind of twiddling their thumbs,” Nunn said.
The situation became so untenable that a municipal court condemned Forest Cove in October 2021, six months after Millennia took over full ownership of the property, with the mayor promising residents would be relocated in early 2022; the state of Georgia subsequently denied Millennia’s applications for tax credits to make improvements. In its lawsuit, Millennia claims it only finalized the $38 million purchase in 2021 before having money for repairs because it wanted to relocate tenants as soon as possible and had secured the money to do so. HUD told Motherboard that it “quickly worked with the City of Atlanta to relocate residents and put an end to the dangerous conditions” at Forest Cove, including by offering federal vouchers to residents to help with relocation. (Millennia disputes this version of events. Caffey-Horne said the city of Atlanta’s “claims that it started the relocation process are belied by the facts”.)
Tenants still living in Forest Cove were required to pay rent on the dilapidated apartments until February 2022, when some residents coordinated a rent strike and demanded relocation.
When tenants arrived to give the company a demand letter, Millennia’s office refused to open the door, Nunn said. Instead, she said, Millennia called the police. Millennia did not respond to a request for comment on this alleged incident.
Caffey-Horne told Motherboard that Millennia’s plan had always been to temporarily relocate tenants and return them to Forest Cove after a $58 million renovation. Millennia’s lawyers similarly argued in a complaint that the company was “months, if not weeks, away from being able to relocate the Forest Cove residents” before the complex was condemned.
Last summer, HUD took the rare step of stopping subsidy payments to Millennia at Forest Cove, saying it would one day transfer payments to another property that has yet to be chosen. The City of Atlanta hopes to eventually rebuild Forest Cove without Millennia’s involvement. In the meantime, the vacant apartments, still owned by Millennia, have caught fire at least four times since last October.
In an email, Millennia put the responsibility for the failures of Forest Cove on the mayor’s office, in part because it pushed for the development to be condemned.
(Photo courtesy of the American Friends Service Committee)
While relocated tenants who spoke to Motherboard said they’re glad to not be in Forest Cove, their advocates are concerned that some residents are being led to similarly distraught housing. In January, the National Housing Law Project, which advocates for Millennia tenants, sent a letter to HUD and the city of Atlanta criticizing the “rushed, chaotic and unlawful relocation of hundreds of families from their former home at Forest Cove,” which it said violated the Civil Rights Act by directing tenants to segregated, low-income neighborhoods. Many of the listed apartments offered to residents had “trash, rats, and roaches, starkly similar to their housing conditions at Forest Cove,” the nonprofit said.
In the letter, the National Housing Law Project also criticized the City of Atlanta and HUD for failing to guarantee a “right of return” to tenants displaced from Forest Cove when it is rebuilt as mixed-income housing, per the city’s plan. Nunn told Motherboard that the Thomasville Heights neighborhood is gentrifying, and residents will not be able to access the resources of the neighborhood they helped enrich.
Publicly, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens says he is determined to right the situation. A representative for Dickens’ office told Motherboard that the mayor “will not rest until every former Forest Cove resident that wishes to return to their community will be given the chance to do so.”
Laney said she’d like to see Forest Cove get up and running again one day if it is demolished and rebuilt. But, she added, “If it’s run by Millennia, I’d never go back.”
Six months before the Tates died, in April 2022, a coalition of Millennia tenants sent a letter to HUD and Millennia highlighting what it said were properties that were “operated for years with hazardous and slum conditions and with HUD’s full knowledge and ratification.” The properties, the coalition said, were located mainly in Black communities.
After years of having individual requests for repairs ignored, tenants started to notice that similar problems surfaced again and again at Millennia properties. Hoping to find power in numbers, some tenants began to organize many of the 280 buildings across the country that make up Millennia’s HUD portfolio in an attempt to hold the company accountable.
The resulting coalition called itself the Millennia Resistance Campaign, and has received assistance from other organizations such as the National Housing Law Project and the American Friends Service Committee. “We felt like it would be more effective to come together and speak with one voice, or at least as centralized a voice as possible,” said Nunn.
(Photo courtesy of the American Friends Service Committee)
In the April 2022 letter, the coalition accused Millennia of chronically underinvesting in maintenance and said Millennia tenants made HUD aware of poor conditions as early as 2017. The coalition then demanded that HUD institute new management at Millennia, impose fines, ask a court to oversee rent payments at some of Millennia’s properties, and stop the company from expanding its federally subsidized empire.
On August 18, 2022, just weeks before the Mississippi gas leak deaths, Millennia CEO Frank Sinito responded by lashing out at the National Housing Law Project, which hosts Millennia Resistance Campaign materials on its website. In a letter, he accused the organization of conducting “a public campaign to spread inaccurate information” and saying that the campaign failed to mention all the repairs completed or underway at Millennia properties.
Eight days later, HUD sent a response of its own. In a letter attributed to Handelman, HUD’s deputy assistant secretary of multifamily housing, HUD acknowledged that Millennia had fallen short of its obligations and said it had denied multiple requests from Millennia to acquire new properties. But HUD said it was hesitant to transfer properties to new ownership, as the tenants had requested, because the new owner would have to start from scratch putting together financing. Handelman suggested residents take up future complaints with regional and state offices rather than HUD’s central office, saying these lower offices could meet and speak with residents and were “familiar with local conditions and officials.”
But the tenants already knew that going through local offices would not yield results. Field offices heads often sent tenants to local contractors responsible for fielding complaints or Millennia staff, the campaign told Motherboard. Sending complaints to local branches has long been a recurring strategy among HUD officials, according to Kate Walz, associate director of litigation at National Housing Law Project.
“No matter how many tenants die, no matter how many national class action lawsuits are filed, no matter how many Senate investigations open up or tenants organize nationally in this way, the common thread is ‘go back to the HUD field office, go talk to Millennia,’” Walz said.
The campaign had said as much in a follow-up letter sent to HUD days before the federal agency’s response. “Many of the tenants, organizers, and advocates trying to get relief and accountability report a constant ‘loop’ they are placed into,” the letter said.
Last September, Millennia announced plans to sell off 33 developments in its affordable housing stock, attributing the decision to high interest rates and a lack of capital to make needed repairs at affordable housing complexes. “I don’t see us taking on challenging projects in the future,” CEO Frank Sinito told Crain’s.
In its statement to Motherboard, Millennia said that publishing an article about the problems within the company’s portfolio would be a “distraction from” the “much bigger issue” of cities “dismantling affordable housing in favor of gentrification.” Caffey-Horne, Millennia’s representative, said that Motherboard’s story would contribute to the “final chapters of Section 8 and affordable housing in America” and “the residents who will be left with few places to go will be the ones most impacted.”
But Millennia’s future in affordable housing is already precarious. In December, HUD told the nonprofit journalism outfit Atlanta Civic Circle that it had decided to temporarily prohibit Millennia from conducting any new business with the federal government, and that the agency is “taking steps” to bar the company and CEO Frank Sinito from all federal programs, including Section 8, for five years.
Brown said she wants to see Millennia get out of affordable housing for good—“I think there need to be criminal charges” related to the deaths, she said—but having someone even worse take over is a real risk.
Technically, HUD must approve the purchaser of any Millennia property. But so far, the federal agency has taken a hands-off approach to the sale and indicated that it plans to preserve decision-making power at the regional offices, and tenants fear their concerns will continue to go on ignored, Simmons said.
Last fall, the residents were able to return to Sunset Village, where the Tates had died one year earlier. In an email, Millennia said that the apartments received a $12.8 million comprehensive rehabilitation that came out to $94,000 per unit. Millennia added that the development has an “extensive waitlist” and management is working to process applications and move-ins, although one tenant told Motherboard the complex has many vacancies because displaced tenants didn’t want to come back.
Tenant Mary Lloyd said the company painted over mold rather than remediating it, and that the water only started working in her bathroom recently. “There are people in the building having major problems,” Lloyd said.
Cyber is a show covering a diverse range of topics. We’ve covered everything from crypto to AI to online cults. If it touches technology or online culture, we’ll talk about it. That’s how you get an episode like today’s, which is both a deep dive into professional wrestling’s latest scandal and a discussion of the latest existential threat: nuclear weapons in space. Vice features editor Timothy Marchman can do it all. First, Marchman walks us through the newest allegations against WWE boss Vince
Cyber is a show covering a diverse range of topics. We’ve covered everything from crypto to AI to online cults. If it touches technology or online culture, we’ll talk about it. That’s how you get an episode like today’s, which is both a deep dive into professional wrestling’s latest scandal and a discussion of the latest existential threat: nuclear weapons in space.
Vice features editor Timothy Marchman can do it all. First, Marchman walks us through the newest allegations against WWE boss Vince McMahon. It’s a civil case that may have wider ramifications for how the U.S. handles non-disclosure agreements. Then we get into a bit of Congressional kayfabe: the reports that Russia wants to put nuclear weapons in space.
Amazon argued in a court filing on Thursday that the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional as part of an ongoing case against the company for retaliation against unionized workers. It is the third company to do so in recent months, joining Trader Joe’s and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The NLRB is investigating numerous unfair labor practice charges against Amazon for its anti-union activity at JFK8, the famed Staten Island warehouse that became the first in the U.S. to unionize in 2022. Desp
Amazon argued in a court filing on Thursday that the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional as part of an ongoing case against the company for retaliation against unionized workers. It is the third company to do so in recent months, joining Trader Joe’s and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Amazon, in response, argued that the NLRB’s actions and structure violate the Constitution’s separation of powers and Amazon’s due process rights under the Fifth Amendment.
“The structure of the NLRB violates the separation of powers because its Administrative Law Judges are insulated from presidential oversight by at least two layers of ‘for case’ removal protection, thus impeding the executive power provided for in Article II of the United States Constitution,” Amazon’s Thursday filing stated. It said that the NLRB’s structure additionally violated Article II of the Constitution because its board members were “insulated from removal by the President except for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance of office.” SpaceX made similar arguments in its lawsuit against the Board.
Amazon argued that the NLRB’s structure also violated its due process rights under the Fifth Amendment because the board members “concurrently exercise legislative, executive, and judicial powers in the same administrative proceeding.” It also argued that NLRB proceedings violated Article III of the Constitution “by seeking to adjudicate private rights outside an Article III court and award a broader range of legal remedies beyond just equitable remedies without trial by jury.”
“This is a major attack on the American labor movement,” said Seth Goldstein, a lawyer at Julien, Mirer, Singla and Goldstein who represents the fired Amazon workers and has long worked with the Amazon Labor Union. “They want to knock down the whole process and make it impossible for us to organize, because if they're successful in what they're doing, the board won't be able to issue any decisions. They're going for everything. They think that Trump is going to get elected—this is what the 2024 election needs to be about.”
Amazon also argues that the case should be dismissed because it “implicate[s] the Major Questions Doctrine,” a new principle followed by the current Supreme Court. Laura Phillips-Sawyer, a professor of law at the University of Georgia who studies antitrust, previously told Motherboard that this doctrine asserts that the court “can [and] will evaluate administrative rulemaking by agencies and determine if the promulgated rule falls within the authorities granted by Congress and the statute,” and that by virtue of the doctrine, “all rulemaking might be challenged.”
Multiple legal experts have said that efforts to deem core governmental institutions like the NLRB or the Federal Trade Commission illegal have stemmed from the leanings of the current Supreme Court. Meta sued the FTC for being unconstitutional in November, in an attempt to stop the agency from blocking the company’s profits off of data collected from minors. It proposed arguments similar to those of Amazon and SpaceX.
In addition to arguing that the NLRB is unconstitutional, Amazon denied many of the allegations made in the complaint. It argued that the relief requested by the union was “speculative, incalculable, would require the Board to dictate substantive terms of bargaining negotiations, [and] would compel Amazon to comply with contractual terms to which it did not agree.”
Goldstein said that this was in relation to unilateral changes made by management at the warehouse, which the union had not been consulted about in advance. “The fact that they're suggesting collective bargaining negotiations when they refuse to bargain with us is absolutely insane,” he said.
The union also demanded that Amazon reinstate union members it had fired, to which Amazon responded that “the board is not empowered to substitute its judgment for Amazon’s lawful employment decisions.”
“This is very, very damaging to collective bargaining, and I could see it having an effect on not just organizing first contracts, but also legacy contracts,” Goldstein said. “Because then, the employer can basically say, ‘I don’t need arbitration because there won’t be any board to worry about.’”
A trial on this case is scheduled for the end of February. Goldstein said it was possible that Amazon might follow SpaceX’s lead and file a preliminary injunction, instead of just arguing the NLRB’s unconstitutionality as part of its defense. Amazon wrote in its filing that it reserves the right to expand its argument during subsequent hearings.
A peer-reviewed scientific journal that this week published a study containing nonsensical AI-generated images including a gigantic rat penis has retracted the article and apologized. The paper was authored by three scientists in China, edited by a researcher in India, reviewed by two people from the U.S. and India, and published in the open access journal Frontiers in Cell Development and Biology on Monday. Despite undergoing multiple checks, the paper was published with AI-generated figures th
The paper was authored by three scientists in China, edited by a researcher in India, reviewed by two people from the U.S. and India, and published in the open access journal Frontiers in Cell Development and Biology on Monday. Despite undergoing multiple checks, the paper was published with AI-generated figures that went viral on social media because of their absurdity. One figure featured a rat with a massive dissected dick and balls and garbled labels such as “iollotte sserotgomar cell” and “testtomcels.” The authors said they used the generative AI tool Midjourney to create the images.
On Thursday afternoon, Frontiers added a notice saying that the paper had been corrected and a new version would be published soon. The journal later updated the notice to say that it was retracting the study entirely because “the article does not meet [Frontiers’] standards of editorial and scientific rigor.”
Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Frontiers directed Motherboard to a statement posted to the journal’s web page on Thursday apologizing to the scientific community and explaining that, in fact, a reviewer of the paper had raised concerns about the AI-generated images that were ignored.
“Our investigation revealed that one of the reviewers raised valid concerns about the figures and requested author revisions,” Frontiers’ statement reads. “The authors failed to respond to these requests. We are investigating how our processes failed to act on the lack of author compliance with the reviewers' requirements. We sincerely apologize to the scientific community for this mistake and thank our readers who quickly brought this to our attention.”
The paper had two reviewers, one in India and one based in the U.S. Motherboard contacted the U.S.-based reviewer who said that they evaluated the study based solely on its scientific merits and that it was up to Frontiers whether or not to publish the AI-generated images since the authors disclosed that they used Midjourney. Frontiers’ policies allow the use of generative AI as long as it is disclosed but, crucially, the images must also be accurate.
The embarrassing incident is an example of how the issues surrounding generative AI more broadly have seeped into academia, in ways that are sometimes concerning to scientists. Science integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik wrote on her personal blog that it was “a sad example of how scientific journals, editors, and peer reviewers can be naive—or possibly even in the loop—in terms of accepting and publishing AI-generated crap.”
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