FEATURE
wood hemmed in by railings that give it the appearance of a livestock pen. She’s slim, with high cheekbones. Her earrings, hammered-silver hoops, poke out from beneath her straight dark-brown hair. She has left a few of the topmost, mother-ofpearl snaps on her plaid shirt undone to reveal a hint of cleavage. She wears clear braces on her teeth. Lena says she was married to Hess for “six amazing years.” No one from Hess’ large, Catholic family has joined her at this memorial. It’s after 9 p.m., and the place is nearly empty.
“How KC’s Wealthiest Enclaves Became a Shadowy Nexus of Predatory Lending” by David Hudnall, December 5, 2013
In a massive investigation, David Hudnall blew the lid off of an exploitive, get-richquick online payday lending scheme being run by some of Kansas City’s most wealthy and supposedly upstanding citizens, and highlighted the dilemmas it posed for the parishes and charities that benefited from the ill-gotten gains. Regarding the church’s position on payday lending, the Rev. Patrick Rush, pastor at Visitation, notes the lack of specificity in the Bible as to what would constitute usury in modern times. “I think in today’s world, you would have to make the judgment of what constitutes a legitimate interest rate versus what constitutes an exorbitant interest rate,” he says. Where does 700 percent fall in that judgment? “I would say that’s an exorbitant interest rate,” Rush says.
Pitch stories published prior to 2000 cannot be found online.
C.J. Janovy: We had a big staff of cool, fun people. Jen Chen was the center of everything, ‘cause she was at the reception desk on the third floor in the newsroom. And you know, people were working really hard, but we were so in love with the work itself and the stories we were writing, that people just seemed really happy. Tony Ortega, managing editor, 2003– 05: My first day was September 2, 2003. The reason that day sticks out in my mind—it was my very first day as managing editor— Joe Miller came into my office and put a cat carrier down on my desk, and it had two little kittens in it that he had found in the street that were being abused by kids. He had rescued them and wanted to know if I had room for them. And I still have one of them today. Joe Miller, staff writer, 2000–04: [When I started] we were still in that old building on Broadway, and it was literally falling apart. Pieces of plaster would fall on people’s desks. There were water stains all over. It was weird. And there was definitely tension between the new hires from New Times and people who had been part of it before. C.J. was definitely tapped into the community and what kinds of stories out there in Kansas City, but we were also sort of watched over by this corporate hierarchy of editors. Tony Ortega: One of my favorite stories was by Kendrick Blackwood about this base jumper who actually allowed Kendrick to accompany him as he jumped off one of Kansas City’s downtown landmarks—highly illegal. I remember working with the company’s attorney to make sure we could even publish it. And Kendrick was great because he took his time and he never knew if he was going to get to publish it or not. We never knew. And then finally the base jumper gave him the thumbs up, so we said go for it. [When it was published,] some people were outraged. Another second later, the jumper lands in the middle of an empty intersection, his heel slamming hard into the asphalt, his knees buckling, his chute floating to the street. Dressed in all black, he bundles up his parachute in his arms and limps to the curb behind a Pitch newspaper box, an orange construction sign and a streetlight pole. (From Kendrick Blackwood’s “Terminal Ferocity,” January 15, 2004) C.J. Janovy: There were times that we were working on stuff that was really scary also. There was a period of time where people were inserting KKK flyers into our papers. And Peter [Rugg] decided to, I don’t know what there was a phone call or an address to a P.O. box or whatever, but he made contact with the person, and responded to the information on the flyer.
Peter Rugg, staff writer, 2007–11: I sent off a thing to the KKK recruitment people—I had to get a post office box under a different name—and I started getting stuff sent to me. Eventually, I got a password for their chat site, their mid-2000s 4chan bullshit where they’d hang out. Trentadue had shaved his head since our meeting at Buffalo Wild Wings, and the tattoos on his scalp were now visible. His parents had taken the kids for the evening, and his wife was at work. He shook my hand, and I followed him inside. There were no Nazi flags on the walls. It was the underwhelming house of any parent of two on the lower end of the economic scale. Stacks of paper stood askew. “What size shirt are you?” he asked. “I’ve got a couple of spare Klan shirts, and I thought you might like them.” (From Peter Rugg’s “My Secret Life in the Klan,” September 27, 2007) Peter Rugg: These people were being outed for being fucking Nazis back before it was cool to out Nazis. There were some threats. At one point, some dude put my parents’ address up on his website, but he fucked up the address. Justin Kendall, staff writer, 2005–11 and managing editor, 2011–16: The company ended up getting a bodyguard. We had two panic buttons. There was a brick thrown through my window after I wrote a story. We got our fair share of hate mail and death threats back in the day. Many staffers’ stories suggest an environment that stretched the “alt” spirit to near-parody: banging out stories on Adderall, smoking K2 in the newsroom for a feature, drunkenly carrying each other to the strip club next door. But it was also one of the paper’s most productive eras. Peter Rugg: I think there’s a bit of self-mythologizing there. Yeah, you’re in your twenties, and you’re like, I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want and take chances and get drunk and try to do this while I can get away with it. And you would be foolish not to take that chance, right? Who gets into writing that doesn’t want to have a couple years of romanticized hanging out and talking shit and doing stories and being clever and all that cliché stuff? Joe Miller: It was definitely like the best job I’ve ever had. It was really fun. I wish I could do it again as far as just the range of things I could write about, and how supportive the environment was that C.J. created. Scott Wilson, copyeditor, 2001–08; managing editor, 2008–11; edi-
tor-in-chief, 2011–17: We were categorically uncool. The analogy I used to use was that we were not cool party people—we were like blind tree marsupials clinging to one another for warmth. Alan Scherstuhl, theatre critic and Studies in Crap founder, 2003–11: I’ve never felt cool in my life, even when I was a 21-year-old nightclub writer. At all the alt-weeklies I’ve worked at, in four cities, the staffs have always been composed of people who are fundamentally uncool but fundamentally passionate. And they’ve all been people who did their best work at the alt. Even if you left The Village Voice for The New York Times, you did your best work at The Village Voice. Even if you left The Pitch for The Kansas City Star, you did your best work at The Pitch. Gina Kaufmann, staff writer and calendar editor from 2001–06: My favorite thing I ever wrote at The Pitch was a very weird feature story but one I still love to this day. It’s hard to summarize, but basically, I took a bunch of artists out to the woods to shoot Tupperware with guns. I also will never forget the time Jen Chen crashed a wake. We made our way to the bar to check out the drink selections. After making sure that we weren’t mooching on an open bar tab (hey, we’ve got some standards), we ordered Bud bottles and Miller Lite, which came in a can. Our domestic beer choices seemed appropriate for Flo’s, which had just two beer taps dispensing Bud Light and one serving Miller Lite. Thus fortified, we started mingling to find out more about Craig. (From Jen Chen’s “Wake Crashers,” January 19, 2006) Nadia Pflaum, staff writer, 2003–11: My favorite stories were always the ones that were so unreal that they seemed like they were fiction, but they weren’t. And we had the opportunity and the time to gather all of the information and weave it all in, make it artful and suspenseful, and, you know, have it all be true at the same time. David Martin, staff writer from 2004– 11: A real strength of the paper at that time was having Charles Ferruzza and Jen Chen in most issues. I imagine a fair amount of our readers did not start or finish every feature or news story. But Charles’s café columns and the Night Ranger were must-reads. Backfire BBQ in Wyandotte County may be the only place in town whose menu potentially could be used as a deadly weapon. The two thin, brushed-steel plates that serve as a cover for this restaurant’s listing of available dishes could, with very little effort, be transformed into guillotine blades thepitchkc.com | July 2020 | THE PITCH
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