Stanley Alpert, environmental lawyer and former federal prosecutor, recounts his 25-hour 1998 kidnapping in NYC’s Greenwich Village—ambushed by three armed men after a subway encounter, forced to withdraw $100K from an ATM, then held blindfolded in a Brooklyn-Queens apartment before release. His survival hinged on calm cooperation, not resistance, despite captors’ threats and legal advice urging him to join their gang. Alpert also exposes ExxonMobil’s MTBE groundwater contamination, peak oil denial, and lobbying against climate science, linking corporate greed to global instability. Callers debate self-defense tactics, gun laws, and systemic failures like police inaction and predatory lending, while Alpert argues stricter regulations—not surrender—reduce violence. His ordeal underscores life’s fragility and the urgent need for societal accountability over profit-driven exploitation. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones, as prolific as they may be, and all covered like a blanket by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
Second half of the official weekend is here, and it's my honor and privilege to be escorting you through it.
All right, let us begin by looking at the never-to-be-disappointing dismal world news.
Virginia Tech gunman Sunghui Cho was as mysterious in death as he was in life, leaving behind few clues for medical examiners.
Dr. William Macello, the assistant state medical examiner based in Roanoke, said Sunday that Cho died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his temple after firing enough shots to wound his 32 victims more than 100 times.
But there was nothing unusual about Cho's autopsy at all.
Nothing that would have even hinted at any psychological problems that might have led him to commit the worst shooting massacre in modern U.S. history.
And I don't think it is usual, although I suppose at times they may find some physiological reason for something like that, a tumor in a wrong place, that sort of thing.
So nothing.
Investigators looked through wreckage Sunday to try and figure out what caused a Navy Blue Angel jet crash during a maneuver while the military identified the fallen pilot as 32-year-old, a 32-year-old, who was performing in one of his first air shows with the team.
Lieutenant Commander Kevin J. Davis of Pittsfield, Mass was in his second year with the Blue Angels, the team known for its high-speed aerobatic demonstrations.
Lieutenant Commander Garrett Casper said, I wonder how many that makes.
I know that over the years I have had to read quite a few headlines about the Blue Angels.
I'm not sure how many crashes.
Somebody will dig that up for me.
Representative Juanita McDonald, a seven-term congresswoman from Southern California, described as a trailblazer and a leader in election reform, died late Saturday of cancer, 68 years of age.
McDonald died at her home in Carson, according to her chief of staff.
Iraq's prime minister is saying Sunday that he has ordered a halt to the U.S. military construction of a barrier to separate a Sunni enclave from surrounding Shiite areas in Baghdad after fierce criticism over the project at home.
The challenge to the U.S. initiative came as Prime Minister Maliki began a regional tour to shore up support from mostly Sunni Arab nations for his Shiite-dominated government as sectarian violence persists despite a 10-week-old security clampdown.
Back to Virginia, still grieving and increasingly wary of the media spotlight, Virginia Tech students returned to their beleaguered campus Sunday, preparing to salvage the final weeks of a semester eclipsed by violence.
The scene on campus resembled a move-in day in late summer with parents helping their children carry suitcases into dorms.
There were cheers, there were hugs, goodbyes.
But instead of excitement, as you might expect for the coming year ahead, there was simply determination to endure and regroup in the fall.
There's going to be a runoff, a very interesting presidential runoff in France, presenting France with a fundamental left-right choice between a conservative who could push his anxious nation toward painful change, and oh, that would be painful for France, wouldn't it?
And on the other hand, a socialist who would be the country's first female leader.
Royal is the first woman to get this close to the home of this major European economic, military, diplomatic power after a campaign marked by suspense, surprise, and unusually dynamic candidates who lured voters to the ballot box in near-record numbers.
Be very interesting to see which way it goes.
Tornadoes in Texas.
Down power lines, flattened houses, roads littered with debris kept many residents from returning to their homes Sunday in this rural panhandle town called Cactus, Texas, hit very, very hard by what appeared to be a group, a swarm, if you will, of tornadoes.
At least 14 people were injured, one of them critically during the storms late Saturday that knocked out power to about 20,000 customers in that region.
In a moment, we'll take a look at some of the rest of the news.
As I mentioned to you last night, briefly actually, and said I would read a little more tonight, we have now found a planet outside of our system that has water in it.
This is big.
Astronomers have detected water in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system for the very first time.
The finding, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal, very prestigious, confirms previous theories that, say, water vapor should be present in the atmospheres of nearly all the known extrasolar planets.
Even hot Jupiter's gaseous planets that orbit closer to their stars than Mercury to our sun are thought to have water.
The discovery announced today means one of the most crucial elements for life as we know it can exist around planets orbiting other stars.
Quote, Travis Barriman, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, we know that water vapor exists in the atmospheres of one extrasolar planet.
And there's good reason to believe that extrasolar planets, others, contain water vapor.
HD 209458B is a well-known planet among hunters.
I didn't happen to recognize it.
In 1999, it became the first planet to be directly observed around a normal star outside our system, and a few years later, it was the first exoplanet confirmed to have oxygen and carbon In its atmosphere, it is separated from its star by only about 4 million miles, 7 million kilometers, and about 100 times closer than Jupiter is to our sun.
So it's really hot.
They think it's losing about 10,000 tons of material every second as vented gas.
Water actually survives over a broad range of temperatures, he explained, but it would need to get quite a bit hotter to completely break the water molecules apart.
Now, what this obviously means is that life is probably common in the universe.
There's probably a lot of it out there.
And so, by the way, in a moment, we're going to open up, I guess I could say, unplanned, certainly unscreened, open lines and let you talk about anything you would like.
But I do have a bit of a question for you.
And that is, if you were an alien civilization, would you contact us?
If you had been observing us, would you be in a hurry to contact us or would you watch from afar?
Anyway, west of the Rockies, the number is 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, many of you there, 800-825-5033.
First time callers, we have many lines.
Area code 818-501-4721.
Wildcard line, folks?
Area code 818-501-4109.
That's where we actually have a lot of lines.
First time callers, just one.
International, 800-893-0903.
If you were a member of a highly developed extraterrestrial society, would you like to meet humans?
Do you think you'd benefit from an encounter with humanity?
In our search for extraterrestrial life, we've got to keep in mind that the present level of our technology, well, it might not be the only obstacle that's preventing us from finding an advanced alien civilization.
Intelligent extraterrestrial species might not want to be discovered by us at all.
In an article in UFO area, they take a good close look at certain aspects of our society that can shatter our dreams of possible contact with aliens.
Why would aliens want to hide from us?
The mind of extraterrestrial beings is perhaps way beyond our comprehension, and we can only speculate about their reasoning and intentions.
The presence of UFOs throughout history indicates aliens are in some way connected to this planet.
Why?
Do they monitor us?
Are they curious about our species?
Or are they simply following our irresponsible acts on the planet?
If UFOs originate from a remote part of this galaxy, it is likely that pure scientific curiosity would attract them to this planet.
However, if alien beings have their home in our cosmic neighborhood, then they have every reason to be concerned.
At the end, our weapons can be a danger to their world as well.
To a technologically and socially advanced extraterrestrial race, we can appear just as primitive as, well, say, the Stone Age man was to us.
Although humanity has made some progress, we're still an intolerant, warrior-like race, and we live in a violent and destructive society.
We will kill and destroy our society, our environment, and in the end, ourselves.
This could be a reason why an alien race doesn't want to make first contact.
By monitoring us, they simply protect themselves from us.
The first thing to do is to revise our attitude with respect to our own planet and ourselves.
We've got to get rid of bad notions that we have the right to exploit other peoples, even other nations or planets for our own profit.
We must get rid of our deep-rooted self-confidence that we have the right to plunder all possible resources we ever see or touch.
When we've achieved these goals, if we do, then perhaps we have the right to hope for future contact with intelligent alien species and perhaps go further.
But that represents, doesn't it, a very interesting question.
After all, if the aliens are watching us, they can see what we do to our neighbors, whether any particular nation feels what they're doing is justified or not.
We cross borders, lop off heads, drop bombs, do things that an alien probably would look at and say, and they're not ready for us just yet, but they might keep looking.
Engineers at the University of Glasgow in Scotland are designing a new breed of planetary explorers, little tiny shape-shifting devices that can be carried on the wind like dust particles.
But guess what?
They're also smart enough to communicate, fly in formation, and take scientific measurements.
Dust particles consist of a computer chip, about a millimeter in dimension, surrounded by a polymer sheath that can be made to wrinkle or smooth out by applying a small voltage.
It'll roughen the surface of the polymer, meaning the drag on the smart dust particle increases and it floats higher in the air.
Conversely, smoothing out the surface causes the particle to sink.
Simulations show that switching between rough and smooth modes, the dust particles can gradually hop toward a target, even in swinging winds.
Swirling, swinging winds.
So, in other words, what we're making is smart dust.
As if we don't have enough now.
Smart dust.
So we can send dust anywhere we want.
They can launch the dust and then guide it where they want it.
If I was an alien civilization, I would probably look at the planet and assume that the dolphins are the intelligent life because they just play in the water all day.
And I would wonder who in the heck these humans are.
It looks like between the energy issues and climate issues and the space debris catastrophe that we seem to be rapidly heading towards, you know, we're on a real path to hurting ourselves.
And I would probably just sit back and watch the fireworks.
And if they've got the technology to get here, they might be able to time travel into the future a few thousand years, you know, as things clean themselves up and they can grab the resources.
You know, that's assuming that another breed of ape doesn't evolve or something.
And she's saying that if the students in mass had rushed him, perhaps they could have stopped it, and perhaps they could have.
Those of you in the audience who have ever had anybody shooting at you probably have a different view of it.
So it's an easy thing to say, you know, just fling your body in the way, rush toward the guy with two guns.
Now, perhaps in a moment when he was reloading, something could have been done, but even then, a kind of paralyzing terror sets in that's hard to describe.
Well, if they're catching the 6 o'clock news, then they're interested in what we're actually doing.
But it's what we're actually doing that has me concerned.
And it seems to me that they would rule out contact.
If somehow they had made it by discovery of element 92, they had stopped their wars, they now have a peaceful society a million years ahead of ours, they'd look at us and go, you know, if by one in a million they make it, we'll check back in a few years.
Now, as I've mentioned a few times in the last couple of weeks, if we did nothing but good news, that's assuming I could find it, we would be tuned out so quickly your head would spin.
And you had asked whether the U.S. would, one, get involved with a war with China, and two, will the U.S. Well, I think I depends whether Taiwan, that's right.
Or China.
And my opinion, and this is just my opinion, the answer is no.
I hate to cut you off, but we're right here at the top of the air.
I'm sorry.
I do think one ship or so would be sent.
We would show the flag, and then I think we'd back far away.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
The following from Great Britain.
Bus drivers have nicknamed a white cat McCavity.
That's after it started using the number 331 several mornings a week.
This feline, which has a purple collar, gets onto the busy Walsaw to Wolfhampton bus at the same stop most mornings.
Then he jumps off at the next stop.
That'd be about 400 meters down the road near a fish and chip shop.
The cat nicknamed McCavady has one blue eye and one green.
The cat was nicknamed that after the mystery cat in T. S. Eliot's poem.
He gets on the bus in the front row of a 1950s semi-detached group of houses, jumps off at a row of shops down the road, which include a fish and chip shop.
The driver, who first saw the cat jumping on the bus in January, said, It's really odd.
First time I saw the cat jumping off the bus with a group of passengers, I hadn't seen it get on.
That was a bit confusing.
Next day I pulled up on Churchill Road to let off a couple of passengers.
As soon as I opened the doors, the cat ran toward the bus, jumped on, ran under one of the seats.
Don't think any of the passengers noticed.
Because I'd seen it jump off the day before, I carried on driving, and sure enough, when I stopped just down the road, he jumped off.
I don't know why he'd catch the bus, but he seemed to like it.
Told some of the other drivers on the route, and they have seen him too.
Since January, when the cat first caught the bus, he's done it two or three times a week and always gets on and off at exactly the same stops.
Now, earlier tonight, I watched my cat, Abby Dos.
As you know, or you probably know, they're running a high-definition series called Planet Earth on Discovery.
And Abby Dos discovered Planet Earth tonight, and for a full 30 to 45 minutes, he sat there right in front of the screen until I finally went and got him a chair.
He was so interested, his little cat eyes never left the screen, and a couple of times he tried to jump through.
So, cats, what can you say?
Back in a moment.
You know, actually, come to think of it, I think that we've got a plasma TV, and of course it's very good and high definition.
And I think that Discovery Channel advertises it, you know, as their window to the world or something like that.
Wouldn't that make a great promo?
All they'd need is a high-def camera focused on, for example, my cat.
And here come a few little flitting things across the screen.
They were showing zillions of them.
That's what got Abby so interested.
He just wouldn't leave.
Anyway, at the appropriate moment, all they'd have to show is a little cat sitting in front of the screen, a little flitting thing coming on, and then clunk, trying to jump through the window, and that would be as good a promo as you could possibly cook up.
I've listened to you for years and never called you at all, but I'm curious about something and it's something I grew up with and I'm curious so ghosts, alien visitors and odd things, do you think that they all combine together because I have a good story to tell you?
Actually, yes, I do have some quite a few thoughts about all of that, you know, it being common, yes.
unidentified
Why?
Well, see, I grew up next to my grandmother's house, and well, that was the first ghost I ever seen was when I was four years old, was at my grandmother's house.
And as a child growing up, I watched my grandmother's barn, and I watched this three times in my life get struck by lightning.
That I've seen it myself.
That I was out in the kitchen getting a drink of water, and I looked up, and I watched the barn get struck three times by lightning.
Okay, but what does that have to do with ghosts?
Well, the ghosts were there already.
The ghosts, that was the first place I've seen the ghosts.
But the aliens are coming in next.
The thing is, and my parents still live in denial over this, and like finally my sister came out of denial last year over this.
But as a kid, there was one time I went out and I was drinking a Guinea glass of water, and all of a sudden I looked up and there was five lights shining down on my grandmother's barn.
And I completely, you know, freaked out.
And it took me about two minutes to finally start yelling my father to my father.
And my father came out there, and my sister finally admits that this happened.
And my sister, like a year ago, she finally, like, I was talking to her on the phone and she was just suddenly like, do you remember that night that there was three lights shining down in Grandma's barn?
And he was talking about how he would like to, the reason why he teaches a lot of these workshops and sells these videos is because he wants people to follow his work and do remote viewing.
And with all these videos that are being sold and all these workshops that are being taught, I don't remember, now you might want to correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I don't remember hearing anybody call up on Coast to Coast and say that, yes, I've taken these workshops and I've remote viewed this and remote viewed that.
Have you ever devoted a particular night or a particular open line to people that are just remote viewers, that are amateur, that are known just to share?
So I wanted to say to any amateur remote viewers out there, one of these nights when you have that, be ready.
Do some remote viewing right now on some of the important worldly issues and then have your results ready so that when you have one of these open line nights, they can call up perhaps on a particular line that you have set aside for them, and they can share the results of what they've foreseen or what have come up during this process.
You know, you're right, and I'm sure there are, but again, kind of like the news, would it be interesting if remote viewers came on and remote viewed, I don't know, some women's club charitable event or something, would people be interested?
No.
What do people want?
They want world-threatening things.
They want to know about tsunamis, earthquakes, being fried by the sun, emerging viruses, tidal waves, tsunamis.
And speaking of tsunamis, it's possible that Crete was what was actually referred to as Atlantis and that Crete was devoured by a giant tsunami.
If you want to read about it, it's on coastcoastam.com right now.
Okay, his book, I've only bought two books off your people there.
But, you know, those crop circles make, and he shows you, so you want to get some people together who can build a craft and those who have the instructions and have the money for it.
You see, now you can afford art to go up there and ride around the spaceships.
You know, well, us, the average Joe here make 50 grand or less.
We can't actually afford that.
But you have all these experts coming out here talking about that they know the secrets of anti-gravity and they write these books on it.
And we want to find out who's got the truth.
And with enough money, you know, I'd be more than happy to give you a dollar a month, you know, considering if most of your districts did that, you orchestrated so that somebody with some property would come out there and maybe take shifts.
I'd be happy to work on a project like that and try to find out what works and what doesn't work before the big rock comes and gets us or, you know, the new 13th planet, whatever happens.
If Uncle Sam is doing this stuff already, which you seem a pretty good chance there is, we can do the same thing too.
And if it costs money, I'll bet you if you ask, a lot of people would send you a buck a month to be able to afford something like that.
And you've got all those arch parts and everything that you don't use.
I've been listening to you for a long time, and I think you're a great guy, and I like what you're doing.
Thank you.
I just wanted to comment that just like with a lot of the other people in the world, there are people who care and want to help, and there are people who just want to pretend like nothing is going on and turn their backs.
And I feel like there's different planets that have different types of aliens or whatnot that some of them are already here maybe among us that are trying to help us that we're unaware of.
And there are some that are turning their back and just simply watching.
So it's a lot like the people here on this planet.
You know, there's people that are always willing to help like your show does.
And there's always those other shows or people that are willing to just stand by and watch.
You know, I don't know if you follow sports at all, but there's this guy, Gary Sheffield, for the Detroit Tigers, and he's been playing awful lately.
And I'm beginning to think maybe some person put some voodoo on him or voodoo hex or even maybe an alien took over his body because he's playing like unbelievably bad.
Hey, I'm calling about the show you had the other night where you were saying, what's going on in society?
That's right.
It just seems like not only, my wife and I have noticed this.
We're longtime fans.
As a matter of fact, we listen on Streamlink.
But not only is society becoming more, as you had mentioned, evil, it just seems more like there's stupidity starting to seed itself, and everybody is just so blatantly ignorant of other people's feelings.
No, and if anything, you know, it's really going the other way.
I mean, if we want to be, we can become more and more and more isolated all the time.
Technology gives us that ability.
So it's very much a two-edged sword.
And I've got a feeling that one edge of it's already cutting near the bone.
From the high desert, the great American Southwest, I'm Art Bell.
Good morning, everybody.
This is going to be very interesting.
Stanley Alpert is an environmental lawyer who worked for years as a federal environmental prosecutor in New York.
He now runs his own firm, the Alpert Firm, suing polluters with the kinds of lawsuits that were popularized in the Aaron Brockovich movie.
In fact, Stan at times works with a real Aaron Brockovich.
One night, he was on his way home alone when a gang of thugs with automatic weapons grabbed him on the street.
They got his PIN number at gunpoint.
When they found out he had a big sum of cash in his savings account, they decided, well, they'd keep him so they could get the money the next day.
What followed was a 24-hour kidnapping ordeal, both harrowing, but also at times, apparently, hysterical.
And Albert was, after all, a federal prosecutor, so he was gathering clues the entire time just in case he managed to get out of there alive, something you would not expect.
These clues would eventually lead the FBI and the New York PD to round up this gang just two days after Stan made it out, and the gunmen are in prison to this very day.
So Stanley, his work and his kidnapping in a moment.
It was a bunch of different things that I got to do.
I was responsible for all different levels of government in the federal system for prosecuting cases under the hazardous waste laws, clean air laws, clean water laws, safe drinking water laws, even endangered species laws.
Believe it or not, we have endangered species in New York City and on Long Island.
Yeah, in the government, I did a case with them, and now that I'm in private practice, I've actually had a couple different kinds of cases with them.
One was when I was leading the effort on MTBE, which is a gasoline additive that the oil companies put in gasoline, that when they put it in, they knew it was going to contaminate groundwater across the country.
The hydrogeologist told them that.
They put it in anyway, and lo and behold, it polluted groundwater across the country.
That's the story that they want people to believe.
But the real story is totally different than that.
They started putting it in years in advance of any kind of a legal requirement to put it in.
They did it at the time.
You know, lead had to come out of gasoline.
They needed something to make cars run better.
So they needed something.
And there were several alternatives they could have used.
They picked MTBE because it was cheaper than the alternatives.
It's made out of a byproduct of the refining process.
So they were able to do it cheaper.
And in fact, there was some evidence that it helped gasoline burn better and might help with the air pollution problem.
The problem is, is in-house, as we learn from the documents that were discovered in these cases, their hydrogeologists would tell them, you better not do this, guys.
You're going to pollute the groundwater all across the country.
Well, the two cases that are very famous are the Lake Tahoe case and the Santa Monica case.
Those are very severe cases of contamination where people literally could not drink the water.
A lot of the cases now involve levels that are low enough that nobody knows whether they'll ever cause cancer because nobody's ever done the studies, but they have taste and odor problems at very low levels.
You know, sometimes people get used to a bad taste in water, so maybe they don't complain that much because it's, you know, it's different kinds of things that can cause a bad taste.
But it's there.
It's there at extremely low levels.
So you really can't serve it to people except at very low levels.
And the oil company's documents in-house, even going back to the 80s, told us all about that.
But like I said, they've used it anyway.
And then what you were referring to, Art, was starting after 1990, in about 1992, there were some new Clean Air Act requirements where oil companies had to use something to sort of improve the air pollution situation.
They had plenty of options.
They chose MTB, as I said, because it was cheaper.
And like I said, as a result, you've got water that some municipalities can't serve to their people.
Well, the MTBE stuff was in my later phase that I'm doing now as a private lawyer, kind of male version of Aaron Brockovich with a law degree.
In the days at the U.S. Attorney's Office, yeah, that's what we would do.
We'd be the courtroom lawyers for the government.
You know, the government has all these different agencies that deal with environmental problems.
For example, the Coast Guard, which, you know, of course, they don't have quite enough staff as they ought to to really patrol well enough, unfortunately.
But one of their great jobs is when there's an oil spill in a harbor, you know, they investigate it.
So I would go to work in the morning, and maybe I'd be listening to AM radio or looking in the local paper, and I'd see that there'd been a spill.
And so I could jump on that right away.
I could call my friends at the Coast Guard, the investigators.
They would start investigating.
We'd do the case together, and we'd try to see if we couldn't figure out who was to blame for that kind of a spill.
Well, the funny thing is, I know we're going to talk a little later about my having been kidnapped in the book, but the funny thing is when it happened, at least one of my friends was thinking that I must have been picked up by some bad guys that I was investigating.
Now, I joke in the book about how if Mobile Oil Company had been smart, they would have kidnapped me.
But actually, at the time, one of my friends knew that I was investigating a spill by a company that was alleged to have some mafia ties.
And one of my buddies actually thought I might have gotten picked up for my job.
The work I do, I think people are pretty civilized.
You know, the likes of an ExxonMobil is not going to do something physical.
What they'll do is they'll litigate you to death until you get to the edge of the trial.
And then maybe they'll settle it on the eve of trial.
Well, you representing the government, while ExxonMobil certainly has a lot of resources, legal and otherwise, the government is not exactly bereft in that category itself.
I mean, in some ways the government is quite powerful, but if you look at like investigative resources for environmental cases, there simply weren't that many EPA agents in the New York area that could do it.
I mean, it needs a lot more.
And then when you're talking about the courtroom battle, you know, it was always sort of me and maybe one or two colleagues against an entire room full of suits.
So they had the advantage in terms of person power, but what we had was a belief in what we were doing.
And we would sit there.
You know, people think government employees don't work.
You know, we would sit there and burn the midnight oil night after night, you know, because we cared about what we were doing.
And so we would counter the room full of suits by just working extra hard.
Yeah, I think that law enforcement starting really, you know, the best progress we made really started in the days of Richard Nixon, believe it or not.
It shows how much our political system has changed.
Some of the most far-reaching and impressive environmental laws were passed back in the days of Richard Nixon.
And since then, there's been tremendous improvements.
You used to have the Cuyahoga River catching on fire, literally.
The Hudson River here was absolutely dead.
And the River Keeper under Bobby Kennedy, well, now under Bobby Kennedy, they started waging little fights against polluters that were just dumping all kinds of stuff in the Hudson.
They have succeeded now, and together with the new federal laws and also federal law enforcement, they have succeeded in cleaning up the Hudson to the point that it is one of the richest, well, probably the richest water body in terms of sea life, river life, which becomes sea life down at the estuary, anywhere in the Northeast.
So there's been huge progress.
The problem is that in some other ways we're in trouble.
I mean, one of the things that, and I worked on some Ocean Dumping Act stuff when I was at the U.S. Attorneys, one of the things that bothers me the most is how much we've overfished so that the notion that our kids are going to be able to eat salmon that they can grab out of the ocean, I mean, it's just getting more and more difficult.
There are also insidious chemicals that climb up through the food chain and then make it up into animals, let's say, that you see up around the Arctic Circle.
It's very, very scary stuff.
So I think my perspective, having done this as an environmental prosecutor for several years, is we've made huge improvements, but we have a lot more work to do.
I mean, the notion that we have to rely solely on fish farms to eat fish, you know, and that they have to use pink dye to make a salmon look like a salmon.
This is sad stuff.
We've got to care a lot about this stuff.
And, you know, I think that people are taking the environmental issue more seriously now than they have in my lifetime, but not seriously enough.
So this is, again, now I'm in my role as a private environmental toxic tort lawyer doing sort of Aaron Brockovich type cases.
Yeah, so Keyspan is an energy company.
Actually, they're trying to merge with a larger foreign company called National Grid.
They're an energy company.
They deliver electricity in this part of the country and elsewhere.
And it's sort of typical of what the polluters do.
They'll get away with as much as possible.
So on Staten Island, they polluted not just their own property.
Well, I mean, they bought this from a predecessor company.
They polluted not just their own property, but the pollution actually goes onto the private properties of eight really lovely homeowners that live right next door to it.
And what they did was they proposed to the state agency a cleanup where they would, if they wouldn't even clean up their own property, they would just put a wall around it and keep it there forever, which is something people do sometimes, but you shouldn't do it in a residential neighborhood when you're right next to people.
But the pollutants that continue onto my clients' property, they've made a cold corporate decision to leave it there forever.
And they just don't give a damn about how afraid my clients are, whether their kids can play in the backyards, whether there's toxic vapors in their houses.
They don't care.
And they're able to push the state agency into it because they've got a lot more power.
The state bureaucrats don't even have enough resources to investigate these things, let alone push around a big energy company like that.
They'll take what they can get.
So I was forced to sue them in state court.
I've got some really lovely clients, good people, just a lovely group of people of sort of the best sort of example of the melting pot in America you could want.
I've got people of every different race and nationality.
They get along incredibly well.
They're good neighbors, and they're very upset.
Their children go to sleep some nights crying because they're frightened by what Keyspan is doing to them.
The federal government thing is really statutes that get written out of Washington.
The private lawsuits that I bring are more out of the common law tradition that came from England, which is basic principles of human justice.
You know, like don't hit me over the head or I can sue you.
Or, you know, use your property so as not to hurt my property.
That's a basic, decent, conservative value that we have in property rights.
So in my new job, I use these sort of common law principles.
And the funny thing is, you think the almighty power of the federal government is so wondrous.
It sure is, but these private principles sometimes are even more powerful.
There's a guy who used to head Earth Justice, which is one of the sort of environmentally friendly nonprofit groups that fight environmental cases.
And he's now in private, and he says that he's able to do more good now because if you sue an oil company to clean up MTBE, I mean, in Santa Monica, where they couldn't drink the water, the oil company settled for numbers that are somewhere between $300 and $500 million.
That's way more money than the government typically gets out of people.
You know, I think the problem is, and people ought to understand this, a lot of guys like me who do this kind of work give up a lot of money to do it.
You know, the U.S. attorney's job is not a bad paying job, but it's nowhere near what private lawyers make in New York.
And, you know, I don't want to tell you what it costs to buy a studio apartment in New York City.
It's ridiculous.
So the problem is at some point in your life, you realize that all your friends and everybody else around you, and even your clients, are owning their own homes, and you're out there renting.
So at some point, you realize that you want to try to actually give it a go in the private system.
I loved my job in the feds, and I did it for 13 years, and it wouldn't be a bad thing if I could, you know, make a little money by being a private lawyer.
And also, as I said, even while it's possible to make a better living this way, you can also do a lot of environmental good.
So it's kind of a nice combination.
So I'm going to stick with this for a while.
I mean, perhaps in the future, I may go back in some form of government service.
Stanley, I'm not sure whether you can come in on this or not, but right now in the world's oceans, there are all of these really weird, really scary, dead spots, literally areas where nothing is living.
Nothing.
Not even microbes.
I mean, really dead areas.
And I wonder how much ocean dumping gets caught.
I have this awful feeling that an awful high percentage of what's dumped into the oceans just gets dumped and nobody ever gets caught.
And then I think after they were alerted to it, I know That the feds floated helicopters over some of those ships to try to see if they could catch them in the act.
And I think the problem is that stuff that gets caught is probably the tip of the iceberg.
And the other problem is there are all these insidious chemicals that nobody's ever really fully studied.
Like DuPont makes this chemical called PFOA, or ammonium perfluoroctanate, which is used for things like stain prevention on carpets or couches and was used in Teflon.
And, you know, they put these chemicals out there.
They don't give a damn whether it's going to hurt anybody, and they don't really ever fully test it on anybody.
They just kind of do a massive experiment.
This stuff slowly leeches in through the rivers, you know, wherever their plants are, like they've got one down in New Jersey.
And is now in private practice doing sort of the same kind of work, actually.
And I suppose there are a lot of bad companies that do a lot of bad things.
But, you know, those companies are really bringing us what we want.
It's a lot like the media.
They're delivering what we want, actually what we need.
In this case, oil.
We have this voracious appetite for oil.
We've just absolutely got to have it, right?
And so they bring it to us.
And I suppose in that process, things that we don't want to know about happen.
We'll be back in a moment.
Well, we're going to talk about the kidnapping here shortly, and I think you're going to find that fascinating.
Can you imagine being a kidnapper and finding out that you've grabbed a federal prosecutor?
Oh, God.
Anyway, Stanley, on the environmental thing for a moment, we do have to have oil.
I mean, we really just insatiable.
We've got to have oil.
We use tons of it in the U.S. Do you have any thoughts on whether peak oil has actually occurred, whether peak oil is real, or is the supply of oil going to go on forever and ever?
The president administration is very open-eyed because they were put into office by the oil interests.
You don't have to look very far to see that Dick Cheney worked for Halliburton, and so their interest is in maximizing short-term profits for the companies that either gave them political donations or that they literally worked for and then will go back to work for when they get out, as opposed to doing what's in the best interest of the American people, which would be creating some incentives for a more diverse energy portfolio.
I mean, I was a pretty young boy in 1973 when we had an Arab oil embargo, and we had lineups for gasoline.
And it seems to me the country knew at that time that it would be really wise to create incentives to go into other forms of energy.
Nobody's saying that you're going to do without gasoline right away.
We need gasoline, there's no question.
We want to drive cars.
We need them.
The question is, will we create incentives for this incredibly vibrant economy with incredibly smart people that work in it to come up with alternatives that will slowly replace the need for us to be drinking oil out of a foreign place that doesn't particularly want us there and forces us to get into wars every several years?
But I mean, there are people who have done studies about what the true cost of oil or true cost of a gallon of gasoline is.
And you can figure in all sorts of things.
For example, you know, if you want to figure out how much it really costs you to drive your car, you've got to take into account how much it costs to build those highways that you drive your car on.
And that's not figured in.
And another thing we certainly don't figure in is how much it costs us to keep fighting wars to try to keep those supply lines open.
So the costs to us are actually much higher.
And there are more insidious costs.
I mean, gasoline contains benzene.
Benzene is a proven human carcinogen.
That means that a certain percentage of family members, of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, of your listeners, a certain small percentage, small but certain percentage, are going to get cancer over the next 10 years because of those contaminants and others.
We pay a huge cost in hospital costs in this country for that.
Nobody's figuring any of that in.
And my only point being is that it's smart as a Society to try to build incentives in to use oil smarter.
I mean, I belie, you know, if the administration had not been lying about the weapons of mass destruction, then I think anyone who says it's only about oil is exaggerating and it's just using that for political reasons.
Because obviously there were other issues besides oil involved.
I mean, we were attacked by terrorists, and certainly Saddam Hussein, if he'd had the capacity, would have wanted to use nukes or chemicals on us if he could have.
The problem is we found out later that they were just fiving about the whole thing, and he really didn't have any of that stuff.
So, you know, from my point of view, by opening up that can of worms, they've just made things worse for the United States, not better.
But is oil a big factor?
Absolutely.
Why are we so interested in that part of the world?
We're so interested, and we give so much attention to it because we need oil.
I mean, if we did it as a humanitarian thing because Saddam Hussein was such a bad, mean guy, then we should have been invading Cambodia back during the killing fields and any number of other, or Africa, when they were lopping off heads.
Or there's any number of other countries that we could have justified going into and getting involved in for those humanitarian reasons, and we did not.
I mean, I'm ashamed that nobody did anything to stop Cambodia, and I'm ashamed that nobody did anything to stop Rwanda.
And frankly, when the massacre in Bosnia was going on, the Europeans were perfectly happy to sit there and watch it happening and do nothing until the U.S. finally stepped in.
So I think there are probably times when U.S. force has to be used for humanitarian purposes.
And I don't think, I mean, I mean, we weren't invading Saddam Hussein.
You know, Rumsfeld was there shaking his hands, you know, a couple of years before he was gassing the Kurds.
When he gassed the Kurds, we didn't do a thing about it.
So I don't think that's our only motivator.
I think we're motivated by a lot of things, including oil, which is a big one in the Middle East.
Well, again, a lot of scientists are saying that we're about to get to peak oil, that if we haven't already arrived at that point, we're just about there.
And that means we're not going to have as much oil to pump out of the ground as we have now or as we have recently had.
And it's going to begin to get a lot more expensive.
I know that because there are some people out there that are given people enough information that they think they've got a basis.
But I mean, it's pure nonsense to deny global warming.
I mean, you know, just about every respectable scientist on the planet is in agreement.
So, you know, to argue against it is really just about short-term profit for a few people.
And that's bad for all of us.
I mean, you know, I mean, nobody knows where any of this is going to end up.
I mean, but the one thing you do know is you're probably going to have a lot more conflict, a lot more war, a lot of economic disruption, a lot of places that are going to be flooded, and a lot of other places are going to have droughts because of these kinds of disruptions.
You know, so my only point is that good companies, if they're motivated by the right purposes, ought to, instead of dedicating their resources to convincing people of hocus pocus, which is what ExxonMobil has been doing for years, that they ought to be doing is hiring some really smart American engineers, maybe even encouraging U.S. kids to go to engineering school so they can come out and come up with smart energy alternatives.
Well, when you hear about a few Pacific islands going under the water, polar bears drowning, and even Bangladesh going underwater, you go, yeah, that's bad.
But I suppose until the waves begin washing up the middle of Broadway, People aren't really going to notice.
Well, listen, it's really good work that you have been doing and that you are doing, but I want to get to your book.
For some reason, by the way, you didn't write a book, I guess, did you, about your work with the federal government or the work you're doing now, right?
You know, probably that day I was sitting around at my desk pushing the latest 20 boxes of documents that had come in from ExxonMobil from one side of the office to the other and, you know, trying to start going through them.
I then was out that evening.
I actually, you know, I'm a single guy in New York City, so I had a blind date that night, which didn't go anywhere.
And then I was on my way home on the subway, and I happened to start up a conversation with a very nice young woman and ended up, she got up off the train near where I did, ended up walking her home, said goodnight.
Then I walked up the street and feeling good.
You know, you don't meet a woman on the subway.
That's just not something that typically happens.
That's right.
And as I get to the corner of 10th Street and 5th Avenue in Greenwich Village, I feel a tug on my elbow from behind.
I spin around and there's a Tech 9 machine pistol sticking in my gut.
I was just walking down the street, feeling all good.
Just met somebody on the train, going home, going to have a cup of tea and read a book.
I had this really interesting book on the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie.
Going to sit home and read it, you know, just feeling great.
And all of a sudden, my life changed.
So, you know, they grabbed me from behind.
I didn't see it coming.
I mean, people talk about having guns and that that's going to help them.
It might help people sometimes, but I've got to tell you, if I'd had a gun on me, I probably would have been killed a lot quicker because they had the drop on me from behind.
Yeah, well, I can't use the words on national radio, but get in the effing car, M-F-er, you know, will blow your effing head off.
Yeah, and then once they had me in the back seat, like I said, I'm looking down.
The leader actually was a very well-spoken guy who starts explaining to me that I need to give him his wallet, and he wants my PIN number, and that, you know, I better cooperate or his henchmen will murder me, and that they're going to take me to the bank and take out some money.
And it was only about 15 minutes into it before they asked me what I did for a living because, you know, they took me to the bank.
They drove me over there, got my PIN number out.
The leader of the gang goes in to get the money.
And, you know, there's a $1,000 daily limit.
And so they're trying to figure out, well, how can I get more money?
And they're asking me how much money I have in my savings account.
Well, I had to fess up that, you know, my life savings that I'd, you know, I'd sweated over, you know, working at a law firm before I went into government was sitting there.
And, you know, and they were like, whoa, what do you do for a living?
And I couldn't lie about it because my business card was in my wallet.
So I said, well, guys, you really kind of picked up the wrong guy because I'm an assistant U.S. attorney.
All right, Stanley, Albert, stay right where you are.
So he's been shoved into a car, Tech 9 in his belly.
We'll take it from there when we get back.
Put yourself in this man's place.
Now, I don't know a lot about New York City muggings, but I don't think they're normally pulled off with three guys with automatic weapons and with a new, modern, expensive vehicle that you get shoved into.
If I were a federal prosecutor and that much happened to me, by the time I got into the car, number one, I would think it was much more than just a robbery.
Number two, I would think that I was not going to get out of it alive, particularly if they were not wearing any masks or anything like that.
I would think I would be moments away from the next life, moments away from the next part of the story.
We'll be right back.
Well, once again, Stanley, I'm not an expert in this sort of thing, but most muggings are, you know, a knife in the ribs or a gun and then a grab and a run.
Not three guys, automatic weapons, new expensive vehicle, that sort of thing.
I mean, it must have seemed at the very beginning like an awful lot more.
The thought that I would possibly be dead was definitely there from the start and really never really went away for the whole ordeal.
The job part, I think it was pretty obvious to me once I was in there and hearing them talking about taking me to the bank and PIN numbers, it seemed to me that it was a robbery.
And then it was a robbery that morphed, you know, because as I mentioned, they took me to the bank and I've got this big chunk of money sitting in my savings, basically my life savings sitting there.
And they've got $1,000 limit on the cash machine card.
So that's when they changed their plan.
Instead of just taking the guy to the cash machine, now the plan was let's keep him.
You know, it was instinctual, and I got to tell you, if you grew up in New York City, you developed some pretty strong instincts about crime because you kind of get used to it.
You know, I've got some of the vignettes from what happened to me and my brother and other family members growing up in New York are in the birthday party.
Some of them are not in there because there wasn't space for all of them in a 300-page memoir.
So, yeah, you're right.
I mean, once they blindfold, I mean, there was 10 minutes where I could have spotted their faces, and the blindfold really was just keeping me from seeing where they were taking me.
Well, were you, nevertheless, putting together in your mind a mental picture of what you could see and remember just on the off chance that you would live through this?
I mean, one of the things that's real interesting, I think I don't want anybody who's driving right now to do this, but anybody who's at home in a safe place, if you close your eyes for a few minutes, you'll see that you can see a lot with only your ears.
It's amazing what you can pick up through your other senses besides sight.
And so, you know, once I was blindfolded, I just went into that mode.
And the one thing that's really interesting also is that, you know, I think none of us really knows how we're going to perform when we're challenged in this way.
But you have extraordinary strength in you when you have an emergency like this happening.
And I was very focused.
So I was listening to everything that was happening.
Anytime I had the chance to sort of negotiate for my life by being polite or giving a decent answer that wouldn't make them angry, I would do it.
And I also started gathering clues from the minute I was in there.
One of the things that's really that I like about my own book is that it's both incredibly scary and also really funny.
I mean, these guys are actually trying to relate to me and figure out what was going on.
So, you know, they're like, you know, you got a wife?
No.
You got a car?
No.
I live in Manhattan who has a car.
You know, you're 38 years old?
Yeah.
You got a girlfriend?
Well, I'm casually dating someone.
I wasn't going to tell them that.
No.
You know, okay, so Stanley, you got all this money in the bank.
You're 38 years old.
You ain't married.
You ain't got no wife.
What the hell have you been doing?
To which I responded, you should ask my parents.
They've been wondering the same thing.
So, you know, and it's real interesting.
I mean, them having me in there, you know, they started to sort of play with me and kind of get to know me, you know, sort of find out what my life was like.
And, you know, so there's some real interesting interactions.
And I think that my instinct was to be as nice and polite and decent as possible.
There's no way I was going to like bust up and say, hey, if you guys don't let me go, you're going to be put in prison for the rest of your lives because I'm a federal prosecutor.
But I mean, after all, kidnapping, robbery is bad enough, but kidnapping, particularly of the kind where you're blindfolded and taken somewhere, that's a big offense.
And one of the reasons I wrote the book is I want people to understand what it feels like to be the victim of this kind of a violation.
It stinks.
You know, like you said before, mammogging's over in five minutes or less.
You know, the thought that you have to go through hour after hour, it's kind of psychological torture of knowing that people who couldn't care less about you can just end your life on a whim.
This was real psychological torture for a lot of hours.
So it never occurred to them to, I don't know, put stockings over their head or anything at all that would hide and prevent a description, an accurate description, from being given to the police?
So the idea was that in the morning, they were going to drive me.
The first idea was to a drive-through bank, and then they decided it would be at a regular bank.
They would drive me to the bank, and they would be waiting outside the bank with their guns, and I would withdraw $50,000, and they would shoot me if I didn't do it.
Then they were talking about maybe one of them would come in the bank with me.
Then when I got to the apartment, and they were pointing the guns at my head, they were saying that they would blow my brains out if I didn't cooperate.
Stanley, you ever seen one of these machine pistols?
All I got to do is pull this trigger, bam, bam, bam, your brains Will be all over that wall.
But then they came up with a threat that was even worse than what I'm describing because they told me that if I didn't cooperate, they would go to my father's apartment and kill him by breaking every bone in his body.
Y'all see, I was going to say, otherwise, just taking you to the bank under any circumstances and letting you walk in is not too bright because you just stay there.
And then when I got inside, I couldn't see out of it.
There was one moment, again, in the afternoon when I was just with the one guy and the girls, that he left the room, and I could tell that there was nobody else in there but me.
And I just creaked my head back and looked out the bottom of the blindfold, and I could see just a little bit across the room, and I could see a little kid's red fire truck.
You know, it looked like it was a place where, you know, where a kid really lived.
And then as soon as the guy came back in the room, I snapped my head back down, and I didn't try to look again.
You know, it was important that they not think that I could see out of it.
After I got out, I read an article that I talk about in the book that describes what you're supposed to do in a hostage situation.
And a lot of what I did on instinct was sort of just the right thing.
You can't get anywhere by challenging them.
You have to be cooperative, put them at ease.
It even says you ought to use humor after the first hour because that may help.
Again, you have to be very careful how you use it.
So, you know, I think being polite, keeping them calm was the best strategy.
And frankly, by the time we were done with the ordeal, I think they really didn't want to kill me.
I think they kind of liked me.
There's some funny parts where they start suggesting that I ought to join their gang and recommend friends that they can kidnap.
You know, because we're starting to get this is after I've been there about 20 hours, and they were actually, you know, these guys were smoking marijuana, and then they had these prostitute girls there.
So they were, one of their fringe benefits in this startup company of theirs was that, you know, they got sexual favors from the girls.
This is Coast to Coast A.M. My guest is Stanley Albert, and his book is The Birthday Party, a memoir of survival.
Indeed so.
You know, you can, perhaps we're, I don't know, a little used to all the violence since it's all around us, but I can assure you, if something like you're hearing about tonight happened to you, you'd probably figure you were dead.
We'll be right back.
Well, okay, Stanley, this ordeal went on for about 25 hours.
Remind me of about what time was it night when you were grabbed, right?
They went back to a bank in their neighborhood and got another $1,000.
And then when they kept me for an additional day, one of the reasons they kept me all that time was to get the one last hit after midnight again, right around the time they dropped me off.
Okay, well, yes, but their plan had been some time, I guess, during the day to either take you to a drive-up or into a bank, and they were threatening to kill your dad.
So as the night goes on, the leader of the gang who's gone out to visit with his fiancé, the other two thugs are sitting there, and they're discussing the plan.
They're saying, this isn't going to work.
It's going to look really funny for the three of us to go to a bank with a Caucasian and try to withdraw a large sum of cash.
We're going to get caught.
And I actually kind of sort of helped them along with that by agreeing that the last time I tried to take a lot of cash out of the bank, the manager came over and all that.
So when the leader of the gang came back in the middle of the night, they tried to convince him not to do this plan.
And eventually they did convince him to do it.
One of the interesting things is they hadn't quite focused on what I told them about being an assistant U.S. attorney yet.
So the leader pops his head into the room while they're having their little conference.
And he says, what did you say you'd do for a living again?
Well, third bank robbery where they help people at the bank, at least.
This is the first sort of larger kidnapping.
Take the guy to the apartment.
They'd never done this before.
You probably would have been prosecuted by the state at that point.
Nobody had crossed state lines.
Once you start messing with the federal prosecutor and making it into a larger bank robbery, which is what my thing became, you're running the risk of federal prosecution.
It turned out on this one that state sentences were a lot higher.
So they ended up getting prosecuted under state jurisdiction.
So at that point, his plan at that point was to actually take me back to where he'd gotten me that morning at about 9 in the morning.
And he told me that's what he was going to do.
But then hour after hour went by, and the leader of the gang doesn't come back, and nobody who's guarding me has any idea what happened or why he's not coming back to return me.
And as you can imagine, I was petrified.
There's nothing like being told you're going to get released.
And, you know, he was kind of satisfied with that.
He was like, well, all right.
And, you know, I think also, in addition to that, I think they realized that they had a hot potato at this point.
I mean, kidnapping a federal prosecutor is bad enough.
And certainly, I said I convinced them that they probably wouldn't get caught.
But if they had murdered me, I mean, you know, you might face a federal death penalty for killing somebody because he's a federal prosecutor.
So they had a real hot potato on their hands.
I think they needed to let me go.
And, you know, the other thing that's very typical in any criminal gang, anytime people are involved, somebody's going to give it up at some point.
If my body had ended up in a dumpster and nobody found it for a month, and then one of those girls got picked up on a prostitution charge and somebody starts leaning on them, somebody was going to give it up at some point.
They actually said a couple of times that it was a shame we had to meet under these circumstances, that if we'd met under different circumstances, we could have been friends.
And you know what, Art?
The funny thing is, in some strange sense, they're right.
If we had met under different circumstances, we could have been friends.
You know, I'm pretty open to different kinds of people.
I grew up in New York City.
You know, I'm sure I could have been friends with these folks.
The problem is, is we didn't meet under different circumstances.
We met where they'd made a choice to try to ruin my life by holding a gun on me, by threatening to murder my father, by throwing the fear of God in me, by causing me extreme trauma, by taking the chance of killing me if anything had gone wrong, they would have killed me as quickly as you might squash a bug.
And so we didn't meet under different circumstances.
And so I'm really happy, of course, even though I sort of get the point, I'm really happy that the justice system has put them away for a really long time because it needed to.
We need these people off the streets because these are dangerous people.
So they end up coming over to my apartment to see if, you know, maybe somebody's bludging me here in my room.
And I'm not here.
And they see my answering machines going off.
So they play the answering machine.
And on the machine are two bone-chilling messages.
Number one, Mr. Alpert, there's been unusual activity on your cash machine card.
Please call the bank immediately.
Number two is from some lovely woman in a neighborhood called Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn who had found my credit cards on the street at 7 in the morning.
You know, if I had ever given it a moment's thought to not speak openly with the police, I had a moral obligation to prevent them from doing this to the next guy.
In fact, I think that they had been convinced by what I just mentioned to you that probably they had done such a good job with the blindfold and not telling me where they were that probably they couldn't get caught.
So I think I sort of put their minds at ease as to whether they were going to get caught or not.
No, they didn't threaten me at all about going to the cops.
When I first started it, the story was so life-altering and also crazy with so many twists and turns that I just thought it had to be written.
There's another thing On a personal level, you know, you go through something like this, everybody's shocked, everybody talks about it for a few weeks.
It's just like the news media, though.
After a few weeks, the whole thing kind of dies out and you forget about it.
There was a feeling in me that this was such a life-altering experience that it needed to be recorded, that somehow, you know, it would not be right to just sort of let it go.
And the fact is, is I didn't do it for this reason, but once I did it, it was cathartic to write the book.
Now, I had an advantage that not everybody has, which is my guys got rounded up within 48 hours, and they got put away for really long prison sentences.
So I don't want to downplay too much the traumatic aspects and what I had to struggle through to get over this.
But I do have to say, and I finish up the book, the last chapter focusing on this, in a chapter called Get What You Want.
For me, almost being killed brought very much into focus the fact that our lives are short.
We don't know how long we're going to have them.
And life is a wonderful thing.
So to me, what is now most important is to live life to the fullest each day, is to really grab it by the horns and go for it because you just don't know when you're going to lose it.
So I'm actually a person these days who will jump into things a lot quicker than I used to.
If a friend says he's going on a trip to Costa Rica and do I want to come along, you know, in the old days, well, maybe I'd have 14 different excuses.
Now I'm much more likely to say, yeah, sure, love to.
And I think what I try to tell people in the last chapter of the book is you've got to grab your dream.
You know, I don't pretend to define for anybody what their dream is.
It may be to build a small business in your town.
It may be to take a big trip.
It may be to, you know, see your son graduate from college.
Whatever that dream may be, jump on it and live it.
We don't know how long our lives have.
We have our lives.
I mean, one of the things I mentioned in the birthday party is the arrogance of the living.
We sort of all expect that we're just going to wake up tomorrow morning.
Well, it ain't true.
I mean, our lives are limited.
And so while you got it, you really need to do the most with it.
Well, I think that there's probably a lot of frustration that they chose this criminal path because when you go down this criminal path, that's where you end up is in prison.
I'd like to hope that what they're making of it is that someday when they get out, they want to live good and productive lives.
I don't have a lot of hope that that's going to be true, but I would like to think that.
So, you know, I think it's a sense of frustration.
You make choices like this, you put yourself in the system, and you end up in a very bad place.
I think that all of the data on what criminals do when they get out of prison shows that the Robert De Niro Cape Fear movie situation just doesn't happen.
When people get out of prison, they have a lot bigger and better things to worry about than trying to go after their victims.
And certainly, I think what the guys in my thing learned was that it was really dumb to kidnap a federal prosecutor.
It'd be even dumber for anything to ever happen to me.
I mean, if I ever slip on a banana peel, the first place the FBI is going to look is these guys and their families and anybody connected with them.
Okay, and maybe this is the most important question, and that would be to anybody else out there who finds themselves in a situation like you were in, and there's a lot of people listening right now, Stanley, how would you advise them to act?
You need to be polite to the people that are doing this crime to you.
You need to try to bond with them if you can.
You need to just be decent and not try to be aggressive.
I think probably a lot of people would have the instinct to get aggressive and say, damn it, if you touch one hair on my head, you're going to be prosecuted.
Or to try to bust out of there.
These are nice fantasies, and these are nice for the movies, but they're not reality.
when you've got seven people on you and at least two guns that I knew about, these are fantasies.
The best thing you can do is try to be polite and cooperative.
I mean, the easiest advice I can give people when they're mugged in the street is don't be a hero.
Take out your wallet, turn it over, and go earn the $200 that you lost, go earn it back.
Because when you're facing a gun or a knife, you don't have much chance.
I mean, I fought in the streets against guys who weren't carrying guns or knives.
But once that knife is on you, once the gun is on you, I mean, even people who are black belts in karate will tell you that when a gun's on you, forget it.
You can't do anything.
Just turn over your money.
Just be polite, turn it over, and hope that the guy doesn't kill you anyway.
It's a little bit into the background that he had in the environmental stuff he was doing.
I had run into midnight dumpers in Ohio in the mid-80s, and they were dumping in the Cuyahoga River.
And I lived right along it, and I ended up living in sort of a fearful situation for several months because I went after these people and organized the community.
Did he ever, I just wondered if he had ever had any confrontations or any prosecutions against some of these people that were known as midnight dumpers back then?
Yeah, I did all sorts of criminal investigations and prosecutions when I was at the U.S. Attorney's Office.
And you would get those instances of midnight dumping.
That would be under federal law, that would be a violation of what's called the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which tells you what you can do with your hazardous waste that you're generating and disposing of today.
There are very strict regulations.
If somebody does that kind of a midnight dump, they're putting themselves up for a potential federal prosecution and maybe a couple of years in federal prison.
You know, I live out here in the desert, Stanley, and I hear people, the desert is a wondrously beautiful, life-filled place.
It doesn't appear that way to a lot of people, and they use it as a dumping ground.
And oh, my God, it makes me angry.
So, you know, I hope that we can begin to, maybe we've already started to kind of stop this stuff in America.
It's our own land.
It's our own country, and we sure don't want to trash it.
All right, Mike in Alaska, you're on with Stanley Albert.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
Stanley said earlier that it's everybody's obligation to stop the people who did what they did to him and, you know, pursue a prosecution against them.
And well, what do you do when the police do that to you, you know, like what they did, what the kidnappers did to you?
I mean, you can't afford an attorney, and the public defender I had wouldn't prosecute the cop.
You know, my birthday party memoir gives the positive side of the cops because I show them for the heroes that they were in my case for having got these guys.
I do understand that policemen have a lot of power, and sometimes they misuse it.
And I think in your kind of situation, Mike, you do need a lawyer to investigate it and to bring a lawsuit against the police if they've done you wrong.
Sometimes you have to pay for it, which is a problem, I understand, to afford it.
If you've been wrongfully imprisoned or hurt by the police, you might be able to get a lawyer to take it on a contingency basis, which means they don't charge you and they only get paid if you win the case.
And I think that in his situation, I think that it depends on whether he's been seriously sort of abused by the police and then whether he can prove it.
And if it's just his word against theirs, there could be a problem.
And you also might have a hard time getting a lawyer to take it because of the evidentiary problem.
I've been on radio and television a lot, but my heart's just pounding like cash, and I feel really, really bad for your guest.
As a former law enforcement agent, him being so many assailants going after him, I think he made the absolute best choice, even though he's probably much better expert on it than I am.
But I have a short story about something that happened to me, and it may help out other people.
My wife had just announced to me that she was going to file for divorce one night.
And I drank a couple beers and I decided I was going to go down to the local quick food stand, you know, and I drove about four miles away in this small city, about 30,000 people.
And I got a couple burgers.
I was bringing them home, and there was a guy hitchhiking.
It was raining.
He was about my age.
This was back in about 1989.
I was between police jobs at the time.
I was just a security officer at the time.
But I did have a revolver with me, and I tucked the revolver under my left leg.
And the guy got in the car, and it was rained, and I felt bad for him.
As soon as he got in the car, he pulled a 9mm out of his boot, and he set it on his lap.
And he said, Mister, you effed up because you are going to die tonight.
And I hope your guest doesn't have post-traumatic stress disorder.
I do.
But it's not just because of that, it's because of other things.
Okay, well, we don't have a lot of time, so how did it resolve?
What happened?
unidentified
Well, how did it resolve?
What I did, I don't know if it was a guardian angel or what happened, but I hit the gas, and I'm going 70 miles an hour through a city, and I'm running red lights.
And I told him, I said, thank God.
I said, you're going to shoot me.
I said, will you pull the trigger now, please?
And he said, what the F are you talking about?
And I said, shoot me, shoot me, shoot me.
And he said, are you crazy?
And I said, no.
I said, my wife's going to divorce me.
I was just going to go home and blow my brains out.
But if you shoot me, I'm going to go to heaven and you're going to go to hell.
I take it he did regard you finally as crazier than he was and backed off, huh?
unidentified
Well, what happened?
We ran lights.
I went past police cars at 70 miles an hour.
They didn't stop us.
In the old days, you just had a belt around your waist.
He didn't put his belt on anyway.
But at any rate, to make a long story short, he just kept telling me I was crazy, and I kept telling him to shoot me because you're going to hell, and I'm going to heaven.
Yeah, well, I think I'm totally with you on the rape thing.
I think it's such a horrible thing for a woman to be in that situation and throwing up on herself if she can do it and somehow just disgust the assailant to the point that he won't do the act.
I'm with you.
It's not a typical choice.
It might work in some instances, but typically the calm, polite approach that I had used probably works a little better.
But Jim also, you know, had his own thing by speeding and then hitting the brakes.
Yeah, I'll tell you what, Art, I've put up a blog for people who want to talk about their crime stories.
And so people can go to stanleyalpert.com if they want to talk about these things.
I don't advise that.
What he's done, I think these are deeply personal choices, and I do understand that when you're victimized, you're very angry, and your natural instinct is to fight back.
And especially for men, you know, there's the thought that you're going to be able to get to the point.
Stanley Albert is my guest from being an environmental prosecutor, federal one, to the incredible ordeal he went through in a kidnapping where I'm sure he thought it was the end of his life.
Chris in Louisiana asks, please ask Stanley if he's attempted to visit the convicted kidnappers since they've gone to jail.
And that, in view of the fact that he wrote a book, is sort of an interesting question, which we will ask in a moment.
Well, how about it, Stanley?
Did you, for the sake of the book, consider perhaps visiting one or several of them in jail?
I managed to get the story of what happened from their point of view because they, six out of the seven of them confessed on videotape, and I was able to get access to that from the DA's office.
So I'm able to present the story from their side, but I didn't go see them, and I don't want to go see them.
They're in prison.
They got what the system gives them.
I don't, you know, apart from getting what justice required, I don't bear them any ill will, but I also have no interest in visiting with them.
Okay, Jim in San Diego says, the guys, in quotes, in the pokey, in quotes, can only wish they had murdered Stanley.
Let's be real.
They're criminals, and they can only feel stupid, and their prison mates must be reminding them on a daily basis that they were stupid for not eliminating Stanley.
They probably feel terrible that they didn't kill me, but if they'd killed me, they would have faced federal death penalty charges and probably would have been put to death.
Robert in Bethesda, Maryland, you're on with Stanley Albert.
unidentified
Hi, good evening, gentlemen.
I wanted to ask if the attorney, as a U.S. attorney, could you use your subpoena power to get information regarding Admiral Geis' testimony of what he's revealed in a documentary called Terror Storm?
I don't understand how people can't get help when the police are involved.
When you've called the police for a certain thing that you were supposed to over and over again, and then they still don't do anything, and now you're the one intimidated by both parties.
Well, they were trespassers, and I was supposed to call on them to keep them off the private property, and the police came and everything, but they wouldn't do anything.
And I've made at least a dozen calls, and they just never do anything.
And then they told me that, well, some of them are cops.
So they wouldn't do anything.
But that leaves me totally intimidated and not, you know, and then someone came, you know, it's a farm.
So then someone came up really close to the house.
When the police wouldn't do anything, it just escalated and it got real bad.
Every time I'd walk out of the back door, they would shoot their guns off because it has to do with hunting.
But they're also trashing the place at the same time.
You know, it's hard for the police to investigate when there's not a clear crime being committed.
What I'd advise in that situation is that you go on the civil side and get a lawyer to write a letter to these folks and tell them that they're trespassing and have no right to be on your property.
First of all, I'd like to say that I had a friend that was an officer.
He went from Arizona to New York to pick up a murderer suspect and bring him back to Arizona.
When he got off the airplane in New York, there was an officer there in YPD that wanted to take his gun away from him.
And he was not allowed to have his gun, so he told him to keep the prisoner.
Well, they decided to let him keep his gun, but they posted an officer outside his motel room all night long and stayed with him the whole time until he got that fugitive back on the plane and left.
Now, your incident that you've gone through is in a state, mind you, that has some of the most strictest gun laws in the country, but they didn't do any good.
And the other point that I'd like to make is that, yes, you did come out okay.
It sounds somewhat like your criminals were a little stupid, but you did come out okay and everything came out fine.
But for every person that turns over and just does what they want, like the gentleman in the car that put the guy through the windshield, hey, in the end run, these people learn that they have to learn that someone might fight back and they're going to get hurt.
And every person who gives up willingly and freely and gives it away, it just teaches them to do it more.
And I got to tell you, if you go To anybody in Europe and ask them to look at the United States and its situation with guns and violence, they shake their heads.
They cannot understand how a country that is an advanced industrialized country can have this level of violence and this level of easiness to get guns.
The reason there are guns on the streets of Brooklyn that guys can use against me is because it's real easy to get them down in Virginia.
And in Virginia, if you're mentally ill, you can walk into a gun shop, buy it, and be killing your classmates within days.
There's something awfully wrong about that.
The only solution to reducing violence in this country is to at least very carefully regulate it.
It's got to be at least as hard to get a gun in this country as it is to get a driver's license.
Because right now, you've got to at least go through some tests, and you've got to show you have some ability to drive a car.
As much as I appreciate the work that he's doing for the environment and other people like Aaron Brockovich and all of that, I'm wondering if somehow, some way, every time Big Oil loses one of those suits to him and to people like him, if we, the motoring public, aren't the ones who are being punished for that after hearing such things as gas is supposed to hit $4 a gallon at the end of the summer.
Your gas prices go up a lot when oil companies make decisions to pollute groundwater nationwide.
They go up a lot when they make decisions to invest millions of dollars in fighting these things and millions of dollars in trying to lie to the American public about the fact that global warming, in their view, doesn't exist.
I mean, there's always an issue of cost in any of these things.
There's a cost we pay as a society.
The question is, where do you most wisely use your resources?
In my view, you wisely use your resources by cutting down on pollution because, in the end, the society pays less for the goods and services that it's getting.
And so it's important that we police these things.
I sure wish that the oil companies didn't decide to contaminate groundwater.
Then they would have saved some money.
And you're right, that does drive up the price of the pump some.
They'd gone out to get McDonald's for themselves, and they wanted to know if I wanted it.
I refused at that point because I was afraid it would be drugged.
After I'd been there about 14 hours, I realized if I didn't take some food, I wouldn't be able to keep up my strength and keep with it.
So I did accept the next time they offered.
In the instructions that the FBI gives to people who are kept hostage, they say that if you're offered food, you should take it because it's a bonding experience with your kidnappers.
So that's what I would advise to anyone who's in that situation.
As for the bathroom, several hours into it, they did ask me whether I needed it.
And when I was about to get up, I was afraid they'd shoot me because they were so nervous that I was getting up to go to the bathroom.
So I kind of stayed put, and I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on.
I'm only going to go to the bathroom.
I'm not going to do anything stupid.
And they, you know, I was blindfolded, but they led me to the bathroom and I did what I had to do.
Tony, somewhere in Canada, you're on with Stanley Albert.
Hi.
unidentified
Yes, hi.
It's Tony, and I'm looking at Stanley's website, which looks great.
I just wanted him to comment on a situation that we have in Canada.
I'm a victim of a predatory lending practice, which involves banks, and I've written two books about it in the spirit that he said he wants to write books to help people to avoid situations like his.
So I'm talking about sitting duck loans and the fact that the Canadian system just will not talk about this and will not do anything.
The police will not do anything.
What do you do in situations where the system is totally against you?
I don't know enough about your situation to really comment.
It sounds like it may be a political issue that you have to build interest in fighting this sort of thing.
unidentified
Yeah, we've actually treated it at political level.
It's gone right to the Prime Minister.
Sitting death loans are well known.
They've been talked about on coast to coast in some fashion with subprime mortgages and so on where people are simply tricked out of their money.
So when somebody like me writes two books and they're simply not allowed on the shelf, I like your website.
I think I may take some lessons from that, but I don't know how to take lessons from you with regards to getting the police or the authorities or the politicians to do something to protect people who get themselves into a situation.
I'm not saying people should never try to fight, but it sounds like in your situation, sir, you did a great thing.
I mean, you had two strong-out guys with box cutters that could have cut you up, and you decided to play it nice and cooperative and just give over a little bit of cash to avoid getting cut up yourself.
I think God bless you because you saved yourself a much bigger problem.
I just heard that call, and maybe I'm just a good old oakie boy, but doing something like that, in my opinion, simply encourages people like that to do things like that in the future, you know, to go ahead and prey on innocent people.
I would have told them, you know, I wasn't interested in their services.
If they then began to approach me in a violent way, I would whip out my concealed carry, legally concealed carry pistol.
And, you know, if my life was threatened.
If my life wasn't threatened, that's not necessary.
But people like this going around preying on the innocent, if we all start appeasing and giving into what they want just immediately, right off the bat, that's simply going to encourage more of this.
He said something a little while ago about the gun laws in Virginia needed to be changed to affect New York.
My opinion, and I would ask, don't you feel that prosecuting criminals and holding the criminals to account, if you use a gun to commit a crime, you are held to the letter of the law and have the book thrown at you instead of infringing on my Second Amendment rights to purchase and own guns?
I truly agree, mental cases, mentally ill people should not be able to get guns, and I agree with that.
But at the same time, why should Virginia's gun laws be changed to help out New York?
Well, okay, if you want to just look at the Virginia tech thing, obviously we all know that Cho, the fellow who did this, had been a danger to himself and others.
I believe that little box was checked in a mental evaluation.
Now, that information definitely should have been available to the gun shop owner who did a background check on Cho before handing over the weapons.
Wouldn't you think?
unidentified
From what I've heard, Art, and I wasn't there, he voluntarily submitted after his counselors said, hey, this guy's a little crazy.
The officers came to see him.
He voluntarily submitted to a 48-hour watching period, whatever you want to call it.
After that, the judge deemed he was not a danger to himself or others, and he was released.
Any incident where you've had that box checked, where you are a danger to yourself or others, which is the reason for the hold, should be available to somebody doing a background check before you buy a gun.
unidentified
Once again, I wasn't there, but from what I've heard in the media, the 48-hour period where he went in was voluntary.
There wasn't a box check to say he was a danger to himself or others.
Regardless, he shouldn't have been able to buy a gun, walk in a gun store, and purchase a gun.
But if you wanted one, it's not hard to find.
Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, anywhere.
You want a gun, you can get a gun.
It's not like you have to go into a store and complete the background check.
You know, he purchased two 10-round magazines on eBay.
It's obvious this gentleman was not informed about firearms.
He planned it out, but he's not a firearms aficionado, if you know what I mean.
And regardless, he got a gun.
And if the guy at the gun store wouldn't have sold it to him, he would have been able to get it somewhere else.
You know, part of me likes what the caller is saying.
I mean, I'm not a criminal appeaser, and one of the things I talk about in the birthday party is how even as a kid, I was fighting back.
Whenever I could, If it was fist on fist, I would do it.
I think that the studies and the statistics plainly show that by the fact that we've put so many guns out in the society in America, we're causing a lot more harm than good.
In my situation, I was grabbed from behind.
If I'd have had a gun on me, it probably would have gotten me killed.
So, you know, and the fact is, is we've made it so easy to get guns and guns that are, you know, not just hunting rifles, which are, you know, easier.