Ambassador De Sade ( sadistic, Straight, Inc, regenerating, Mel Sembler) Bush rewarded one of his loyalists with the ambassadorship to Italy -- despite his past as the founder of an cult-like teen rehab clinic.
Feisty
Bush rewarded one of his loyalists with the ambassadorship to Italy -- despite his past as
the founder of an cult-like teen rehab clinic.
Mel Sembler, former US Ambassador to Italy. REUTERS/Tony Gentile
Among our president's appointments of GOP activists to important posts, we've done worse
than Melvin Sembler, the Ambassador to Italy who couldn't speak Italian. Unlike the FEMA
chief, who had real responsibilities, Sembler sometimes found himself a fifth wheel around
his own embassy. As the Washington Monthly has reported, the scandal that claimed Scooter
Libby's job last month may have sprung from secret Rome meetings between neocons, an
Iran-Contra figure and an Italian intelligence boss who later pushed phony WMD
documents -- all behind Sembler's back.
But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson in how cruelty can
be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations. For 16 years, Sembler,
with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT,
Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by
mid-1993. Just one of many survivors is Samantha Monroe, now a travel agent in
Pennsylvania, who told The Montel Williams show this year about overcoming beatings, rape
by a counselor, forced hunger, and the confinement to a janitor's closet in "humble
pants" -- which contained weeks of her own urine, feces and menstrual blood. During this
"timeout," she gnawed her cheek and spat blood at her overseers. "I refused to let them
take my mind," she says of the program. The abuse took years to overcome.
"It sticks inside you," she told Williams, "it eats at your soul." She told AlterNet that
she was committed at 12, in 1980, for nothing more than being caught with a mini-bar-sized
liquor bottle, handed out by a classmate whose mother was a flight attendant. Samantha's
mother suspected more, and a STRAIGHT expert reassured her fears. The small blonde junior
high-schooler was tricked into being taken to the warehouse-like STRAIGHT building. Her
mother, told by counselors that her daughter was a liar, was encouraged to trick the girl
for her own good.
Overcome by dread in the lobby, Samantha tried to run but was hauled into the back by
older girls. Inside, as was standard operating procedure, she began the atonement process
that cost over $12,000 a year: all-day re-education rituals in which flapping the arms
("motivating") and chanting signaled submission to "staying straight." She was coerced,
she says, into confessing to being a "druggie whore" who went down on truckers for drugs.
"You're forced to confess crimes you never committed." (Some survivors call it extortion.)
Melvin Sembler stepped down earlier this year as Our Man In Rome -- he also served under
the first Bush as Ambassador to Australia. Were Monroe's story unique, his STRAIGHT
clinics might still be in business. Instead, his creation, which he stubbornly defends,
closed under a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by 1993, ranging from
sexual abuse, beating and stomping to boys called "faggots" for hours while being spat
upon -- humiliation so bad that a Pennsylvania judge recently ruled it potentially
mitigating of a Death Row sentence for a former STRAIGHT teen who committed a homophobic
murder.
Although prosecutors closed the clinics, six-figure settlements sucked it dry, and state
health officials yanked its licenses after media reports of teen torture and cover-up,
Sembler himself escaped punishment. As one of the preeminent and hardest-working GOP
fundraisers, Sembler has received the honor of living during the George W. Bush presidency
at the Villa Taverna, the official residence for the U.S. ambassador, which has the
largest private garden in Rome. One night in May at "The Magic Kingdom" (as Mel and Betty
call it), the dining room filled with smoke from fine cigars, as the ambassador
entertained Bush Sr. and an entourage -- until Betty complained that the old friends were
stinking up "my house," the Washington Post reported.
He's come home, but still wafting across national drug policy is the influence of his
STRAIGHT, which has legally changed its identity to the Drug Free America Foundation
(director Calvina Fay denies it's the same organization but the name change is listed in
Florida corporate filings). Subsidized by tax dollars, it lobbies for severe narcotics
policies and workplace drug testing, with an advisory board that includes the like of Gov.
Jeb Bush and his wife Columba, and Homeland Security Director of Public Safety Christy
McCampbell. A more pressing issue is that former overseers of Sembler's company, true
believers in the STRAIGHT model, are still running spin-off businesses that treat teens
with the old methods.
Starting out STRAIGHT
The story begins in 1976 when Sembler, who'd made his fortune in Florida real estate,
founded STRAIGHT from the ashes of The Seed -- an earlier program suspended by the U.S.
Senate for tactics reminiscent, said a senator, of Communist POW camps. But as the Reagan
years rolled into view, and a climate of fear nurtured a Shock and Awe approach to teens,
the Semblers found a new world of acceptance for an anything-goes treatment business,
meting out punishment in privately run warehouses. Endorsers from Nancy Reagan to George
H.W. Bush lent their names to the program, celebrating a role model weapon in the "war on
drugs."
Nine years before the elder Bush took office, Sembler was a faithful political supporter,
and raising millions beginning in '79 for the Bushes' clash with Reagan for the Republican
nomination. In 1988, as Bush finally accepted the GOP's nomination for president, Sembler
sat in the front row. With his man in the White House, STRAIGHT would become a vehicle for
purchasing eminence as a Drug War thinker. By 1988, Sembler wasn't just running the Vice
President's "Team 100" soft money campaign and enjoying steak dinners with him -- he was
sojourning in George and Barbara Bush's living room, briefing the candidate on drug
policy. As a token of his friendship, he gave Bush a new tennis racket, receiving this
note in return: "Maybe we can play at Camp David someday."
And Sembler's success grew and grew as the Clinton era spooled out. The slickly dressed
go-getter smashed records as RNC Finance Chairman from 1997 to 2000, chairing the
"Regents" club that accommodated such super donors as Enron's Ken Lay to fund George W.
Bush's campaign machine.
Meanwhile, a coast-to-coast trail of human wreckage had ensued during STRAIGHT's reign
from 1976 to 1993 -- its survivors claimed physical, sexual and psychological trauma. The
Web sites Fornits.com and TheStraights.com have collected many of their stories. Posts
Kelly Caputo, an '88 alumna: "I don't think I will ever be the same. My every thought has
been violated, confused, degraded and warped."
"My best guess is that at least half of the kids were abused," says Dr. Arnold Trebach, a
professor emeritus at American University who created the Drug Policy Foundation to find
alternatives to harsh laws. He has singled out STRAIGHT in his book "The Great Drug War"
as among drug warriors' worst mistakes.
But today, Sembler's trail of purchased political friendships has led him through the
opulent doors of the $83 million "Mel Sembler Building" in Rome, christened this year with
help from a longtime ally in Congress, Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-FL). Not the palace where
Sembler worked as ambassador, but another of the Eternal City's architectural treasures,
built in 1927 and now dedicated as an annex to the U.S. Embassy in a $30 million
renovation at taxpayer expense. "Narcissus is now Greek and Roman," said the Washington
Post of the monument. No one could remember any other diplomat receiving such honors, not
even Benjamin Franklin.
"We don't do that, do we?" George W. Bush reportedly told the congressman, according to
Congressman C.W. Bill Young 's (R-Florida) speech during the ceremony. "We don't name
buildings for ambassadors where they have served."
"Mr. President," the politician replied, "I introduced the bill and you signed it." Bush
may have missed the Sembler Building provision, tucked as it was into an appropriations
bill. But he owed much to the longtime family friend, whom he thanked on "The Jim Lehrer
Report" [RealAudio] in 2000 for raising $21.3 million at a single dinner in April, a new
record. Asked what favors the money paid for, Bush professed wonderment at the premise: "I
know there's this kind of sentiment now -- I heard it during the primaries ... [that] if
someone contributes to a person's campaign, there's this great sense of being beholden."
At the Sembler Building, visitors can stroll among the Italian frescoes of cherubs and
heavens, and marvel at the spoils of Bush family loyalty, and meditate on the human costs
that made Sembler's paradise possible.
STRAIGHT's practices
Melvin Sembler's Jekyll-and-Hyde empire appealed to parents with cheery pamphlets bearing
pictures of happy and reunited families that had put their horrible pasts behind them.
Even Princess Diana had graced the clinics with a visit, celebrating STRAIGHT as a
humanitarian institution. George H.W. Bush named the program among his "thousand points of
light." But many called it Hell.
Taking in new kids without much discrimination -- many addiction-free -- STRAIGHT staff
assured parents that a variety of troubled teens could benefit from their brand of
discipline.
Vanished from home and school, the newcomer would enter the care of a "host home"
overseen, at night, by the same counselors up in her face by day. Over the months,
patients like Samantha Monroe earned back basic privileges like speaking or, in the
distant future, going to the bathroom alone, without an ever-present minder's thumb in the
belt loop -- literally. The counselors were themselves STRAIGHT kids, who had been molded
into drug warriors in the heat of humiliation. They'd learned to play along and join the
winning side, becoming the hall monitors and the muscle that enforced the rules.
From the outset, STRAIGHT's method was on thin ice with regulators. The underpinnings had
long struck critics as more Pyongyang than Pinellas County. Sembler took his blueprint
from another St. Petersburg program, The Seed, in which his son had enrolled in the 1970s.
The Senate was less impressed than Sembler with The Seed. Senator Sam Ervin, who'd brought
down Richard Nixon, killed the program's federal subsidies for funding a method "similar
to the highly refined 'brainwashing' techniques employed by the North Koreans." Ervin's
1974 probe into the rise of treatment abuse articulated an admirable American ideal: that
"if our society is to remain free, one man must not be empowered to change another's
personality and dictate the values, thoughts and feelings of another." Sembler had other
ideals in mind, as hundreds of STRAIGHT victims would later attest.
Finally, one by one, the 12 clinics, which had once formed a nine-state empire, went dark.
Much of the money was lost in settlements, but jury verdicts offered a peek into the
regularity of the abuses. Florida patient Karen Norton was awarded $721,000 by a jury
after being thrown against a wall in 1982 by the Semblers' treatment guru of choice: Dr.
Miller Newton, whose unaccredited Ph.D was in public administration, but was tapped by the
Semblers as STRAIGHT National Clinical Director. He's emblematic of how the creature
Sembler built just won't stop sprouting heads, having personally launched spinoff
businesses with names like KIDS. As a result, Newton has paid out over $12 million to his
victims. Having moved back to Florida, he now calls himself "Friar Cassian," a priest in
the non-Catholic Antiochian Orthodox church.
But just last month, Betty Sembler testified in a case against a STRAIGHT critic that
Miller Newton, the dark cleric of rehab, is "a very close and dear friend and a valued
one," and an "outstanding individual." Had he committed outrageous acts? "Absolutely not,"
she said, adding that it was incomprehensible that ex-STRAIGHT teen Richard Bradbury was
picketing Newton. Thanks to her judgment of character, Newton has been given a voice in
national drug policy, listed as a participant in a Drug Free America Foundation
"International Scientific and Medical Forum."
From the beginning, critics were shocked to find that the keepers freely acknowledged many
of the tactics -- yet insisted they were necessary. Mel Sembler even seems to have been
emboldened by painful questions about his clinics. "We've got nothing to hide -- we're
saving lives," he said in 1977 after six directors quit over practices that included
kicking a restrained youth. He remained closely involved in personnel management. Almost
two decades later, recalling how the ACLU was furious about STRAIGHT's practices, Sembler
told Florida Trend Magazine in 1997 -- "with a grin," the reporter wrote -- that "it just
shows that we must have been doing things right."
And rather than clean up Florida's program, he apparently leaned on health inspectors in
1989 to go easy on it. Reports of a cover-up wouldn't emerge for four more years -- long
years, for the teenagers committed to a program that wouldn't lose its license until 1993.
STRAIGHT foe Bradbury, believing he'd been "brainwashed" into becoming an abusive
counselor, brought the clinics to the attention of the state after years of protest.
Inspector Lowell Clary of the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services
found that reports of illegally restrained and stomped-on teens had been swept under the
rug, likely with help from Republican state senators, who went unnamed, but made phone
calls urging the clinic stayed open. A "persistent foul odor" hung over this use of power,
said a St. Petersburg Times Op-Ed applauding the death of STRAIGHT.
"While at the facility," wrote Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services
Acting Inspector General Lowell Clary on May 19, 1993, "the team [of inspectors in 1989]
received a phone call informing them that no matter what they found, STRAIGHT would
receive their license." "If you do anything other than what I tell you on this issue, I
will fire you on the spot," an HRS official was told. Clary wasn't positive, but evidence
suggested that "pressure may have been generated by Ambassador Sembler and other state
senators."
By now, Clinton was in office. Four years earlier, while young "druggies" were still being
restrained to chairs for 12 hours, denied medication and sent to the hospital with
injuries, the 1989 report would have tarnished President George H.W. Bush's "points of
light." Bush had designated STRAIGHT an American treasure. On that fragile premise, not
one but two STRAIGHT presidents had been named ambassadors in 1989, the year of the
Florida inspection. Sembler got the Australian assignment. The other post sent co-founder
Joseph Zappala to Spain armed for diplomacy with a high school education. The two were
mocked in People as "too hick to hack it." They'd clowned around during the nomination
process, turning in nearly identical answers on Senate disclosure forms. In the "languages
spoken" box Sembler had written, humorously, "English (fluent)."
That took real cheek. These two pranksters had been leaders of a group characterized as a
destructive cult by top authorities on cult abuse ranging from Steve Hassan of the Freedom
Of Mind Center to the late Dr. Margaret Singer of UC Berkeley, an expert on the abuse of
American servicemen in the Korean War whose expert testimony was used to close a facility
in Cincinnati. Bradbury, the whistleblower, concurs, saying the program modified his
personality into something monstrous. Bradbury attended the St. Petersburg, Florida
clinic. "You don't understand what they did to these kids," Bradbury told AlterNet. "They
put stuff up my butt."
But you wouldn't know from Sembler's State Department biography that his claim to fame has
such a shoddy legal record. The program has the honor of being described as a "remarkable
program" in his bio, and it credits STRAIGHT with saving 12,000 kids. The ambassador did
not return attempts to contact him during the reporting for this story, and declined the
author's interview requests last year through a U.S. Embassy spokesman.
In addition to receiving a second Ambassadorship from the second Bush president, his
Governor Jeb Bush named August 8, 2000, "Betty Sembler Day" for her "work protecting
children from the dangers of drugs," labeling her "ambassadorable." The next year, at a
drug policy conference in Florida, a writer from the Canadian legalization magazine
Cannibis Culture asked her about the STRAIGHT victims. "They should get a life," he quotes
her as replying. "There's nothing to apologize for. The [drug] legalizers are the ones who
should be apologizing."
The ambassador's wife is an outspoken critic of what she calls "medical excuse marijuana,"
and serves on the boards of such mighty anti-legalization campaigns as the International
Task Force On Strategic Drug Policy, which works with Latin American countries to lobby
for harsh drug laws. Mel himself used his Rome ambassadorial pulpit for a global
conference in 2003, appealing to the "moral imperatives" of the drug war and urging a
"culture of disapproval of drug abuse." DFAF, founded by the Semblers, receives hundreds
of thousands of dollars in grants from the Small Business Association to advance workplace
drug testing in businesses -- for example, a handout in 2000 of $314,000. Betty Sembler is
president and Melvin has served as chairman.
STRAIGHT's Spin-offs
Though Sembler's clinics were shuttered, the spirit of STRAIGHT lives on as a flourishing
model for drug rehabilitation. That includes offshoots run by former STRAIGHT staff, such
as the Orlando STRAIGHT spin-off, SAFE, which was described by 16-year-old Leah
Marchessault in 2000 as "something from the Twilight Zone" in a report by Florida's WAMI
TV station.
Leah had gone to visit her sister, in for heroin abuse, only to be told she herself was a
"druggie" -- sound familiar? And when Leah fled, she was pinned against a wall and
assaulted by a pack of nine women members who forced her to undergo a full-body search.
Another girl told WAMI of being "forced to stand for about an hour and a half, the
attention being focused on me, and about every 10 minutes I was told how I was full of
crap, how I needed to be flushed out."
Despite their cheery names -- SAFE in Orlando, Florida; Kids Helping Kids of Cincinnati,
Ohio; Growing Together of Lake Worth, Florida -- these barely regulated warehouses cry out
for oversight. Hungry for recruits, they appeal to the fears of parents by warning a child
will die on the streets if uncorrected by their methods.
In the TV report, the presence of a spokeswoman named Loretta Parrish was evidence that
SAFE was the child of STRAIGHT -- she'd been the local STRAIGHT's marketing director until
1992, when the old company closed under state scrutiny, and SAFE, a new company, almost
immediately sprang up to replace it. A new head for the hydra: Parrish didn't dispute the
visiting sister's horrifying experience, but called it necessary, as if explaining
something something obvious to her since the '80s.
"Yes we do require that," said Parrish. "And if they don't, then they have to remove the
other child. This is a family treatment program. And unless the entire family is in
treatment, it doesn't work."
"We do not do a strip search that is different from any other treatment program," she
adds, and later described the teens and moms attacking SAFE as "a coalition of
cockroaches." Gov. Jeb Bush even endorsed SAFE in a letter he wrote as "a valuable tool."
And so with the former STRAIGHT bosses rich in Republican honors, and insulated in a
political Xanadu not unlike the alternate reality field engulfing the White House, a new
generation of teenagers is going under the hammer, as an old generation of victims finds
cold comfort for their own suffering. If this is the compassionate kind of conservatism,
how harsh the other variety must be.
John Gorenfeld, a freelance writer in San Francisco, will be blogging further details of
this story at gorenfeld.net/john.
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