Detecting a Problem

Hello! Welcome to The Weekend Gene Pool, where I grill you for information and then serve you up, piping hot, striped by char-broil, to the readers on Tuesday. Today we are going to discuss, for the first time, a dramatic true-life journalism experience I once had. I can do this on account of I just discovered the individual at the center of it is dead. I no longer owe him a sacred promise of privacy and it is a cool story, and I hope it will elicit similarly cool and amusing stories by you.

But first, a bit of current-events mirth. If you have not seen this spectacular performance by Lewis Black on The Daily Show this week, take five minutes to watch it. It is pee-in-your-pants funny. It is about the issue of The Undecided Voter. I’ll wait right here until you finish.

Okay, good.

So, the year was 1975 or 1976. I was either 24 or 25, depending on the unfortunate imprecision of my previous sentence. I was in my first newspaper job, in Albany, New York, and though technically still incompetent — I was about as competent as your average 24- or 25-year old — I was deeply respected in the newsroom because this was, after all, Albany, New York, and we were all making about $120 a week and I was one of the older, more seasoned guys.

A big story in Albany at the time was the city’s efforts to land a pro basketball team — in this case, a team that would be a new franchise in the fledgeling American Basketball Association. The main proponent of this plan was a man name Mark Binstein, a New Jersey businessman.

Twenty years earlier, Binstein had been a star college basketball player at Army — he once scored 50 points in a game, and at the time this collegiate record remained on the books. Of course this was back in basketball’s inglorious Jewish Era, the heyday of the “set shot,” when players seldom actually moved on the court inasmuch as they seemed to be immobilized by ball-and-chains around their ankles. They passed the ball, bucket-brigade style until one of them got momentarily “open” because another guy was fiddling with his ball and chain.

Anyway, Binstein, by then about 45, was in town to persuade a very rich local old lady to finance a stadium for the Albany area, in order to house a new franchise. A lot of money was involved, and after a brief professional romance with the very rich lady, the two of them had had a public falling out, and the potential deal went sour. It was around that time that Mark Binstein came to me — initially incognito — to say he wanted to be my Deep Throat on a story about that lady and the nefarious group of vulturous horribles who surrounded her and defrauded her and stole the new team away from the city.

Very quickly, I discovered his identity. I forget how, but it was something as stupid as his having idiotically included his name and address tag on a letter he wrote me. So we met, and he started feeding me information. And I was able to confirm some of it — he had supplied correspondence — and published it, and they were really good stories. Dirt. Indeed, there had been some shady dealings back there.

After a while I realized that I was increasingly relying on the accuracy of Binstein’s information, to the point that it was bothering me. So I met with Bob Fichenberg, the executive editor of the newspaper, and said I wanted to give him (Binstein, not Fichenberg) a lie detector test. Fitch said fine, and authorized a trip to New York City, national home of famous polygraph examiners.

Binstein said fine, too! He offered to drive me and my talented colleague with whom I had collaborated on these stories, to New York. We took him up on it.

It was the second-worst trip either she or I had ever taken. We took the New York State Thruway (speed limit: 65) from Albany to New York, a trip that should have taken two and a half hours, max. This took four and a half because Binstein was driving it at 45 miles an hour and had a really weak bladder requiring many stops. At one point, I asked him about all this, and he said “I am a cautious driver, and I am proud of that.” We were passed roughly 1,700 times by other drivers, virtually all of whom gave us savagely dirty looks.

By the end of the trip both I and and the other reporter, whose name was Arlene, were so mad that if you spat on us, we’d have sizzled.

The lie detector people separated us from Binstein, who was led into the room with the machine, and left alone. We were in an adjacent room, with a one-way mirror into the room where Binstein was. We all watched as he got up and walked over to the polygraph, and began inspecting it minutely. If he’d had a Sherlock Holmes style magnifying glass, he’s have whipped it out.

“He’s gonna lie!” said examiner number one.

“He’s gonna lie real big,” amended examiner number two.

Apparently, this is a significant sign for polygraph examiners, as important as the actual test results. Subjects who show inordinate curiosity about the machinery are scared of it, for good reason.

Indeed. In the ensuing hour, Binstein failed the test terribly. We stopped relying on him, and the stories about the arena ceased.

—

Why am I telling you all this? Because I dislike “overly cautious” drivers who are proud of their timidity and over-caution. They are bad, evil people. And to me, it was, or should have been, a major clue to what was about to happen.

Share with us similar times you noted something about someone — maybe a small something — that should have given you clue about something bad you would later find out. It could be someone famous that you don’t personally know, but the closer and more personal story, the better.

Or some experience you’ve had about lie detectors.

Or, you know, something about undecided voters. In any case, just write to us. Do it here:

And finally, two things.

1. “Yahya Sinwar” is an amazing aptonym for the guy behind the October 7 massacre, leading to a global disaster.

Take this Gene Pool Gene Poll:

See you on Tuesday, when there will be a Major Announcement.