Fortress India

Felani wore her gold bridal jewelry as she crouched out of sight inside the squalid concrete building. The 15-year-old’s father, Nurul Islam, peeked cautiously out the window and scanned the steel and barbed-wire fence that demarcates the border between India and Bangladesh. The fence was the last obstacle to Felani’s wedding, arranged for a week later in her family’s ancestral village just across the border in Bangladesh.

There was no question of crossing legally — visas and passports from New Delhi could take years — and besides, the Bangladeshi village where Islam grew up was less than a mile away from the bus stand on the Indian side. Still, they knew it was dangerous. The Indians who watched the fence had a reputation for shooting first and asking questions later. Islam had paid $65 to a broker who said he could bribe the Indian border guard, but he had no way of knowing whether the money actually made it into the right hands.

Father and daughter waited for the moment when the guards’ backs were turned and they could prop a ladder against the fence and clamber over. The broker held them back for hours, insisting it wasn’t safe yet. But eventually the first rays of dawn began to cut through the thick morning fog. They had no choice but to make a break for it.

Islam went first, clearing the barrier in seconds. Felani wasn’t so lucky. The hem of her salwar kameez caught on the barbed wire. She panicked, and screamed. An Indian soldier came running and fired a single shot at point-blank range, killing her instantly. The father fled, leaving his daughter’s corpse tangled in the barbed wire. It hung there for another five hours before the border guards were able to negotiate a way to take her down; the Indians transferred the body across the border the next day. “When we got her body back the soldiers had even stolen her bridal jewelry,” Islam told us, speaking in a distant voice a week after the January incident.

Other border fortifications around the world may get all the headlines, but over the past decade the 1,790-mile fence barricading the near entirety of the frontier between India and Bangladesh has become one of the world’s bloodiest. Since 2000, Indian troops have shot and killed nearly 1,000 people like Felani there.

In India, the 25-year-old border fence — finally expected to be completed next year at a cost of $1.2 billion — is celebrated as a panacea for a whole range of national neuroses: Islamist terrorism, illegal immigrants stealing Indian jobs, the refugee crisis that could ensue should a climate catastrophe ravage South Asia. But for Bangladeshis, the fence has come to embody the irrational fears of a neighbor that is jealously guarding its newfound wealth even as their own country remains mired in poverty. The barrier is a physical reminder of just how much has come between two once-friendly countries with a common history and culture — and how much blood one side is willing to shed to keep them apart.

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The Godfather of Bangalore

Originally published in Wired.

It’s a little past midnight, and a lonely parcel of farmland not far from the new international airport in Bangalore, India, is soaking up a gentle rain. At the center of the lot is a house surrounded by a low stone wall. There’s a hole in the roof and a bushel of ginger drying under an awning. Large block letters painted on the wall read: THIS PROPERTY BELONGS TO CHHABRIA JANWANI. Inside, eight men—two armed with shotguns—confer in hushed voices as they peer out the windows. Is it safe for them to go to sleep, or should they stand watch another few hours? A guard wearing a dirty work shirt is the first to notice signs of trouble. In the distance, flashlight beams sweep the roadway. The lights advance, accompanied by a chorus of voices. Then the sound of people scrambling over the wall. One of the guards makes a break for the gate, sprinting toward a police station a mile away. Before the others can do much more than scramble to their feet, 20 attackers brandishing swords and knives emerge from the shadows. Some carry buckets of blue paint. It takes them only a minute to overrun the building. Three guards who stood their ground lie bleeding on the floor. The others surrender.

Firmly in control, the marauders shift gears. They pull out rollers and slather paint over Chhabria Janwani’s claim to the land. By the time a police jeep pulls up, the sign is only a memory. The attackers have achieved their goal. Thanks to the convoluted rules surrounding land ownership, the removal of Janwani’s lettering throws his claim into question. The dispute is no longer just a criminal matter of a gang of outlaws taking over a piece of ground; now it’s a civil issue that will have to be mediated in the courts. This kind of legal battle, with its near-endless appeal process, could easily last 15 years. If Janwani hopes to develop or sell the parcel during that time, he’d be better off just letting his assailants have the property in exchange for a fraction of its value.

Bangalore’s Mobster Turned Mogul: Muthappa Rai is an Indian real estate power broker. He used to be a mafia don, wanted for murder by the Indian police. Wired’s Scott Carney talks to the Bangalore land baron.

Bangalore, the fifth-most populous city in India, is the tech outsourcing capital of the world. In the past decade, more than 500 multinational corporations have established office parks, call centers, and luxury hotels here. The arrival of US companies like Adobe, Dell, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Yahoo, along with the emergence of homegrown outfits like Infosys and Wipro, has transformed this sleepy outpost into a premier showcase of globalism. Bangalore accounted for more than a third of India’s $34 billion IT export market in 2007. Upscale commercial spaces like UB Tower, modeled after the Empire State Building, and first-rate educational institutions like the Indian Institute of Science set the standard for what India could become.

But there’s a dark side to Bangalore’s rocket ride. City officials—at least those who aren’t taking bribes—struggle to reconcile the gleaming promise of the information economy with the gritty reality of systemic corruption, a Byzantine justice system, and a criminal underworld more than willing to maim and murder its way into control of the city’s real estate market. As tech companies gobble up acreage, demand has pushed prices into the stratosphere. In 2001, office space near the center of town sold for $1 a square foot. Now it can go for $400 a square foot. Janwani bought his 6-acre plot in 1992 for $13,000. Today, even undeveloped, it’s worth $3 million.

A guard carrying a short-barrel shotgun patrols the area around Muthappa Rai’s home.
Photograph: Scott Carney

But high prices are only part of the problem for businesses looking for space in the city. It’s nearly impossible to determine who actually owns any given piece of Bangalorean real estate. Some 85 percent of citizens occupy land illegally, according toSolomon Benjamin, a University of Toronto urban studies professor who specializes in Bangalore’s real estate market. Most land in the city, as in the rest of India, is bound by ancestral ties that go back hundreds of years. Little undisputed documentation exists. Moreover, as families mingle and fracture over generations, ownership becomes diluted along with the bloodline. A buyer who wants to acquire a large parcel may have to negotiate with dozens of owners. Disputes are inevitable.

That’s where Bangalore’s land mafia comes in. With the courts tied up in knots, gangsters offer to secure deeds in days rather than years. “Businesspeople like to do their business, but many times the system does not permit them to do it,” says Gopal Hosur, the city’s joint police commissioner. “Because of escalating land values, unscrupulous elements get involved. They use muscle power to take control of the land.” Some 40 percent of land transactions occur on the black market, according to Arun Kumar, an economist at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Often the local authorities facilitate these deals. A World Bank report rated the Bangalore Development Authority, which oversees urban planning, as one of the most corrupt and inefficient institutions in India.

Lokesh’s nickname, “Malama”, means “medicine”. As in if you have a problem, Lokesh is the medicine. He is a well-known rowdie who settles real estate deals with force.
Photos: Scott Carney

On the ground, violence is meted out by local toughs like “Mulama” Lokesh, whose first name means “medicine”—as in, if you have a problem, Lokesh has the cure. He’s an old-school gangster who happily shows off a bag full of curved swords called longs and cruel Chinese-made knives that he keeps in the trunk of his car. Despite a record of charges that include murder and extortion, even he is wistful for the old days. “The money is so big now that the value of human life has gone down,” he says. “Now people fight with guns.”

Foreign Investment in Bangalore (in millions).

Inspector S. K. Umesh holds a cell phone a few inches from his ear, eavesdropping on a conversation. Since he became a police inspector four and a half years ago, his district’s crime rate has plummeted by 75 percent. He’s killed five of the city’s most wanted criminals and caught more supari killers—contract hit men—than any other officer in Karnataka, the state in which Bangalore is located. Every few seconds, the wiretap emits a soft beep. Wrapping his hand over the receiver, he says, “Without surveillance, we wouldn’t be anywhere.”

Umesh estimates that Bangalore is home to nearly 2,000 gangsters, 90 percent of them vying for a stake in the real estate market. Calling up a file on his computer, Umesh scrolls through hundreds of mug shots, offering a running commentary on which subjects have committed murder.

Umesh points to a face on his screen: Muthappa Rai. Owing to a successful career as a mob don, Rai has a net worth measured in billions of dollars. Once he was among the most wanted men in India. Today he professes to have reformed, renouncing violence and founding a charitable organization. But he’s also in real estate.

“In a way, Rai is just like any other goonda in Bangalore,” Umesh says. Still, the mobster has made his mark on the city’s underworld. In the 1980s, land disputes were settled with fists, knives, swords, and bamboo canes. But after Rai’s arrival in the mid-’80s, guns became the weapon of preference. He often outsourced the violence to pros who learned their trade on the streets of Mumbai and dispatched their victims with firearms.

These curved swords known as “longs” and chinese knives came from the back of Lokesh’s trunk. He keeps them on hand just in case he, or his men, have to use them.
Photograph: Scott Carney

“He started out with a few card parlors and cut his teeth killing the leaders of rival gangs” Umesh says. Rai murdered a rival in an early ’90s drive-by shooting, the inspector explains. Then he fled to Dubai, where he continued his operations. As the price of real estate back home began to take off, he paid $75,000 for the murder of a developer named Subbaraju who refused to sell a plot of land that Rai wanted. The lot would have become an upscale mall had not the hired assassin dropped his cell phone at the scene with Rai’s Dubai number on redial. Later, the killer fingered Rai as his employer. Rai admitted ordering the hit to a Bangalore news reporter.

In 2001, Interpol issued a Red Notice—essentially an international arrest warrant—for Rai’s extradition. Umesh flew to Dubai to help. The Dubai police nabbed Rai at his home, which had two Mercedes-Benzes parked outside, one red and one purple.

“But none of this matters,” Umesh says. “The court acquitted him, and in India there is no such thing as double jeopardy.” How could such a tightly wrapped case unravel? “It is very difficult to move things in our judicial system,” Umesh says. Moreover, testimony can be hard to come by. “There were lots of things going on: intimidation, tampering with witnesses.” Few victims of mob violence will speak out, for fear of further harm. Witnesses are threatened; judges are afraid to try powerful mobsters.

I meet with Subbaraju’s son, Jagdish Raju, a few blocks from where his father was killed, at an office building he leases to the government. His eyes fill with tears. “How can we fight the Muthappa Rais of the world?” he asks. “There was no use. What’s done is done.”

Umesh takes such hopelessness in stride. “Police work is like a sport,” he observes. His job is to bring criminals to court, but he holds little hope of seeing them convicted.

Two burly men carrying shotguns smile grimly as I drive past the first checkpoint to Muthappa Rai’s fortified compound. I’m an hour south of Bangalore in a patchwork of fallow fields and construction sites. Rai’s mansion comes into view at the top of a hill, a giant white building surrounded by a 20-foot-high concrete wall.

At the gate, armed security guards frisk me. They inspect my digital recorder to be sure it’s not a bomb. A golf cart carries me over an intricate driveway of cut brick. Hopping out at the front door, I step onto a floor of polished Italian marble.

Rai’s home is immense and gaudy, replete with gold ornaments and crystal chandeliers. Though he spends almost all his time here, the house feels eerily unlived-in, like a hotel lobby, as a platoon of servants keeps every surface shining. In the garage sits a bulletproof Land Cruiser. An attendant tells me Rai outbid Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister of Pakistan, for it. The vehicle is built to withstand AK-47 bullets and rocket-propelled grenades.

Muthappa Rai says that he has reformed from a life of organized crime and is now a social worker and real estate developer.
Photograph: Scott Carney

Rai greets me with a charismatic grin. I ask about the need for such high security. “I am suffering for all of the things I did in my past,” he says. “I can’t trust anyone, not the government and certainly not my old enemies.” In 1994, in court on extortion charges, Rai was shot five times by a gunman dressed as a lawyer. Although he managed to beat the rap, he languished in bed for two years. The man who hired Rai’s assailant wasn’t so lucky; he was gunned down while the don lay in his sickbed. Did Rai order retaliation? He lets out a hearty laugh. “Five bullets,” he says cryptically.

But those days are behind him, he says. He has reinvented himself as a champion of Karnataka’s downtrodden. The primary layer in Rai’s veneer of respectability is Jaya Karnataka, a nonprofit social services organization with political overtones that, according to its Web site, appeals to a “universal order based on principles of human dignity, solidarity of people, and freedom of communication.” Jaya Karnataka runs free health camps around the state, digs wells in drought-stricken areas, and funds cataract and open-heart surgeries for the poor. Since Rai founded the group 18 months ago, membership has swelled to 700,000 in more than 300 branches across the state. Many people assume the group is Rai’s first sally in an upcoming bid for public office.

The organization also serves as a storefront for Rai’s main line of work: real estate. “When a foreign company wants to set up a business, they don’t know who to trust,” he says. “They need clear titles, and if they go to a local person, they’re going to get screwed with legal cases. But if Rai gives you a title, it comes with a 100 percent guarantee of no litigation. No cheating. It’s perfectly straightforward.” On any given day, he says, 150 people make their way to his opulent mansion to seek his help. He declines to name clients—association with his name might be bad for their business—but he lets slip that he recently acquired 200 acres of land for the titanic Indian conglomerate Reliance. A US firm looking to rent or buy might also go through Rai, but not directly. A facilities administrator in Bangalore—probably Indian—would work with a developer who, in turn, would contact Rai to secure a plot. “There’s no question of American companies coming to buy land,” he says.

Two guards armed with shotguns protect the front gate to Rai’s mansion.
Photograph: Scott Carney

According to a lawyer who deals with land issues, the system works like this: Asked to intercede by a prospective buyer, Rai checks out the parcel for competing owners. If two parties assert ownership, he hears both sides plead their case and decides which has the more legitimate claim (what he calls “80 percent legal”). He offers that person 50 percent of the land’s current value in cash. To the other, he offers 25 percent to abandon their claim—still a fortune to most Indians, given the inflated price of Bangalorean real estate. Then he sells the land to his client for the market price and pockets the remaining 25 percent. Anyone who wants to dispute the judgment can take it up with him directly.

Rai’s lieutenant, Sangeeth—who prefers to be identified as the boss’s “blue-eyed boy”—says that violence is almost never an issue. “All anyone needs to hear is his name,” he says. “If a rowdy won’t back down, then we go to the person who is behind him and cut it off at the spine,” Sangeeth explains. “In the hypothetical instance where it does need to come to violence, someone might need to be beaten up. The next day we would leave a message that we were behind it and that this was just a warning. The name alone has power.”

Paradoxically, Rai’s strong-arming may be helping to curb violence in Bangalore. With a system in place—even a corrupt system—everyone knows how the game is played. As a result, fewer people get hurt. Or, as Rai would have it, “ultimately, everyone wants to settle. No one wants to go to the courts.”

Traffic and land mafia are some of hottest political issues in Bangalore. Anti-corruption candidates routinely target both for votes.
Photograph: Scott Carney

India’s judicial system may be convoluted, but it’s not as corrupt as its law enforcement agencies. In August 2008, Bangalore’s new police commissioner issued a memo to police stations trying to rein in widespread corruption. The circular begins: “It is alleged repeatedly in the press, as well as by the members of the public, and the floor of the legislature, that police officers have converted their police stations in Bangalore city as offices to settle land disputes and are taking huge amounts of illegal gratification. This does not augur well for our department.” The next 16 pages are filled with instructions for handling suspected mob activity and land disputes. Officers are threatened with strict censure if they fail to comply. Unfortunately, the guidelines are toothless because the department has yet to find an effective way to police the police.

Collusion between enforcers and mobsters raises troubling questions about the future of this city. “Since Bangalore went global, things have gotten worse,” says Santosh Hegde, his graying hair dyed jet-black and a chain of prayer beads around his neck. He’s the state official responsible for prosecuting corruption cases. “Businesspeople want to get things done quickly, and they have no option but to bribe officials to shortcut the bureaucracy,” he says.

Hegde, 68, served six years on India’s Supreme Court before taking the anticorruption beat. He oversees a team of accountants who burrow through documents and field operatives trained in covert recordings and sting operations. Since assuming office, Hegde has charged more than 300 officials with receiving cash bribes totaling over $250,000 and illegal assets and land holdings worth $40 million. That’s just 5 percent of total bribery in Karnataka, he says, which he estimates at more than $800 million. When we meet, local newscasters are reporting his latest triumph: the arrest of five civil servants who had allegedly collected $1.5 million in illegal assets and cash.

A painted over sign to Chhabria Jarwani’s land. Three days before this picture was taken, a gang of almost 40 men stormed this plot of land and took it over. Their first action was to paint over the owner’s name in order to orchestrate a false legal claim against him.
Photograph: Scott Carney

Hegde blames the avalanche of corruption on the outsourcing boom. “Certainly IT companies contribute to the problem,” he says. “They work with people who have only a shady title to the land. Then they occupy buildings that are constructed illegally, without permission from the authorities. I don’t want to name specific firms, but huge companies build illegally here.”

Hegde lodges a new case almost every day, but the power of his office is limited. To bring a case to court, he needs permission from what regulations call “the competent authority.” This usually means the malefactor’s superior officer, who has little motivation to expose corruption within his own department.

Hegde has reviewed two complaints that mention Muthappa Rai. In one case, a landowner alleged that Rai’s men tried to intimidate him into selling a lot in Electronics City, a Bangalore suburb packed with IT companies. He asked the police for protection. “The officer told him that it was best to settle—an obvious case of corruption,” Hegde says. “We began an investigation, and suddenly the man who filed the complaint disappeared. We had to close the case.”

Still, Hegde remains hopeful—and defiant. “I have lived a full life already,” he says. “If they kill me, I will die happy. And if Muthappa Rai gets public office, he’ll be under my jurisdiction,” he adds with a wry smile.

Back in his mansion on the outskirts of Bangalore, Rai stretches out on a leather sofa and smiles. “Foreign companies come in and everything improves,” he says. “I have seen this happen the whole world over. Now I’m helping make it happen here.”

Fire in the Hole

by Jason Miklian and Scott Carney

Originally published in Foreign Policy Sept/Oct 2010

The richest iron mine in India was guarded by 16 men, armed with Army-issued, self-loading rifles and dressed in camouflage fatigues. Only eight survived the night of Feb. 9, 2006, when a crack team of Maoist insurgents cut the power to the Bailadila mining complex and slipped out of the jungle cover in the moonlight. The guerrillas opened fire on the guards with automatic weapons, overrunning them before they had time to take up defensive positions. They didn’t have a chance: The remote outpost was an hour’s drive from the nearest major city, and the firefight to defend it only lasted a few minutes.

The guards were protecting not only $80 billion-plus worth of mineral deposits, but also the mine’s explosives magazine, which held the ammonium nitrate the miners used to pulverize mountainsides and loosen the iron ore. When the fighting was over and the surviving guards rounded up and gagged, about 2,000 villagers who had been hiding behind the commando vanguard clambered over the fence into the compound and began emptying the magazine. Altogether they carried out 20 tons of explosives on their backs — enough firepower to fuel a covert insurgency for a decade.

Four and a half years after the attack in the remote Indian state of Chhattisgarh, the blasting materials have spread across the country, repackaged as 10-pound coffee-can bombs stuffed with ball bearings, screws, and chopped-up rebar. In May, one villager’s haul vaporized a bus filled with civilians and police. Another destroyed a section of railway later that month, sending a passenger train careening off the tracks into a ravine. Smaller ambushes of police forces on booby-trapped roads happen pretty much every week. Almost all of it, local police told us, can be traced back to that February night.

The Bailadila mine raid was one of India’s most profound strategic losses in the country’s protracted battle against its Maoist movement, a militant guerrilla force that has been fighting in one incarnation or another in India’s rural backwaters for more than 40 years. Over the course of the half-dozen visits we’ve made to the region during the past several years, we’ve come to consider the attack on the mine not just one defeat in the long-running war, but a symbolic shift in the conflict: For years, the Maoists had lived in the shadow of India’s breakneck modernization. Now they were thriving off it.

Only a decade ago, the rebels — often, though somewhat inaccurately, called Naxalites after their guerrilla predecessors who first launched the rebellion in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari in 1967 — seemed to have all but vanished. Their cause of communist revolution looked hopelessly outdated, their ranks depleted. In the years since, however, the Maoists have made an improbable comeback, rooted in the gritty mining country on which India’s economic boom relies. A new generation of fighters has retooled the Naxalites’ mishmash of Marx, Lenin, and Mao for the 21st century, rebranding their group as the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and railing against what the rebels’ spokesman described to us as the “evil consequences by the policies of liberalization, privatization, and globalization.”

Although it has gotten little attention outside South Asia, for India this is no longer an isolated outbreak of rural unrest, but a full-fledged guerrilla war. Over the past 10 years, some 10,000 people have died and 150,000 more have been driven permanently from their homes by the fighting. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a high-level meeting of state ministers not long after the Bailadila raid that the Maoists are “the single greatest threat to the country’s internal security,” and in 2009 he launched a military surge dubbed “Operation Green Hunt”: a deployment of almost 100,000 new paramilitary troops and police to contain the estimated 7,000 rebels and their 20,000-plus — according to our research — part-time supporters. Newspapers run stories almost daily about “successful operations” in which police string up the bodies of suspected militants on bamboo poles and lay out their captured caches of arms and ammunition. Many of the dead are civilians, and the harsh tactics have polarized the country.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way — not in 21st-century India, a country 20 years into an experiment in rapid, technology-driven development, one of globalization’s most celebrated success stories. In 1991, with India on the brink of bankruptcy, Singh — then the country’s finance minister — pursued an ambitious slate of economic reforms, opening up the country to foreign investment, ending public monopolies, and encouraging India’s bloated state-run firms to behave like real commercial ventures. Today, India’s GDP is more than five times what it was in 1991. Its major cities are now home to an affluent professional class that commutes in new cars on freshly paved four-lane highways to jobs that didn’t exist not so long ago.

But plenty of Indians have missed out. Economic liberalization has not even nudged the lives of the country’s bottom 200 million people. India is now one of the most economically stratified societies on the planet; its judicial system remains byzantine, its political institutions corrupt, its public education and health-care infrastructure anemic. The percentage of people going hungry in India hasn’t budged in 20 years, according to this year’s U.N. Millennium Development Goals report. New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore now boast gleaming glass-and-steel IT centers and huge engineering projects. But India’s vast hinterland remains dirt poor — nowhere more so than the mining region of India’s eastern interior, the part of the country that produces the iron for the buildings and cars, the coal that keeps the lights on in faraway metropolises, and the exotic minerals that go into everything from wind turbines to electric cars to iPads.

If you were to lay a map of today’s Maoist insurgency over a map of the mining activity powering India’s boom, the two would line up almost perfectly. Ground zero for the rebellion lies in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, a pair of neighboring, mostly rural states some 750 miles southeast of New Delhi that are home to 46 million people spread out over an area a little smaller than Kansas. Urban elites in India envision them as something akin to Appalachia, with a landscape of rolling forested hills, coal mines, and crushing poverty; their undereducated residents are the frequent butt of jokes told in more fortunate corners of the country.

Revenues from mineral extraction in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand topped $20 billion in 2008, and more than $1 trillion in proven reserves still sit in the ground. But this geological inheritance has been managed so disastrously that many locals — uprooted, unemployed, and living in a toxic and dangerous environment, due to the mining operations — have thrown in their lot with the Maoists. “It is better to die here fighting on our own land than merely survive on someone else’s,” Phul Kumari Devi told us when we visited her dusty mining village of Agarbi Basti in June. “If the Maoists come here, then we would ask their help to resist.”

The mines are also cash registers for the Maoist war chest. Through extortion, covert attacks, and plain old theft, insurgents have tapped a steady stream of mining money to pay their foot soldiers and buy arms and ammunition, sometimes from treasonous cops themselves. The result is the kind of perpetual-motion machine of armed conflict that is grimly familiar in places like the oil-soaked Niger Delta, but seems extraordinary in the world’s largest democracy.

This isn’t just an Indian story — it’s a global one. In the wake of Singh’s economic reforms, foreign investment in the country has grown to 150 times what it was in 1991. Among other things, India has opened up its vast mineral reserves to private and international players, and now major global companies like Toyota and Coca-Cola rely on mining operations in the heart of the Maoist war zone. Investors in the region claim that the fighting is taking a toll on their businesses, and Bloomberg News recently estimated that some $80 billion worth of projects are stalled at least in part by the guerrilla war, enough to double India’s steel output.

But in our visits to the region and dozens of interviews there — with miners and politicians, refugees and paramilitary leaders, cops and go-betweens for the guerrillas — we found a far more complex reality. Mining companies have managed to double their production in the two states in the past decade, even as the conflict has escalated; the most unscrupulous among them have used the fog of war as a pretext for land grabs, leveling villages whose residents have fled the fighting. At the same time, the Maoists, for all their communist rhetoric, have become as much a business as anything else, one that will remain profitable as long as the country’s mines continue to churn out the riches on which the Indian economy depends.

The first sign you see as you leave the airport in Jharkhand’s capital city of Ranchi welcomes you to the “Land of Coal,” and indeed, mining underlies every aspect of life here. Seams of coal are visible in the earth alongside the rutted roads that connect the jungle hamlets. Travelers learn to anticipate mines not by any road signs, but by the processions of men pushing bicycles heaped with burlap sacks full of coal: day laborers who pay for the opportunity to scrape the stuff out of thousands of off-the-books mines and sell it door to door as heating fuel, for perhaps a few more dollars a day than they would make as farmers trying to eke out a living from Jharkhand’s depleted soil.

India’s coal country was mostly passed over by British colonists until they discovered its mineral wealth in the late 19th century and built the obligatory handful of dusty frontier towns and roads necessary to take advantage of it. Today the region bears the obvious scars of a hundred-odd years of heavy industry. The damage is most visible at road marker 221 of Jharkhand’s main north-south highway, about 40 miles outside Ranchi, where a freshly paved patch of asphalt veers sharply west and snakes up a smoky hill through the village of Loha Gate and into an ecological disaster zone. Shimmering waves of heat, thick with carbon monoxide and selenium, waft through jagged cracks in the pavement large enough to swallow a soccer ball. A hundred feet below, a massive subterranean coal fire, started in an abandoned mine, burns so hot that it melts the soles of one’s shoes. The only vestiges of plant life are the scattered hulks of desiccated trees. Like the legendary coal fire that destroyed Centralia, Pennsylvania, this blaze could easily smolder for another 200 years before the coal seam is finally burned through.

There are at least 80 coal fires like this burning in Jharkhand, turning much of the state’s ground into a giant combustible honeycomb. A fire ignited in 1916 by neglectful miners near the city of Jharia has grown so large that it now threatens to burn away the land beneath the entire community, plunging the 400,000 residents into an underground inferno. One mine just outside Jharia collapsed in 2006, killing 54 people.

Coal mining and armed rebellion have long gone hand in hand in what is now Jharkhand, both dating back to the mid-1890s, when the British began extracting coal from the area and Birsa Munda, today a local folk hero, launched a tribal revolt to regain local control of resources. The British quelled the uprising with a massive deployment of troops, but the resentment festered. India’s government after independence proved a poor landlord as well, with decades of mining disasters — more than 700 people were killed in them between 1965 and 1975 alone — and a corrupt, nearly feudal government that made what was then the state of Bihar notorious in India as the country’s most poorly run, backward region.

By the 1990s, fed-up residents campaigned to carve Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh into their own jurisdictions. The politicians behind the movement argued that the people who lived in the shadow of the mines were the least likely to benefit from them, the spoils instead accruing to large out-of-state corporations and venal government officials in distant capitals. In 2000, India’s Parliament acquiesced, forming new states that then-Home Minister L.K. Advani declared would “fulfill the aspirations of the people.”

But statehood only enabled the rise of a new cast of villains. Absentee political landlords were replaced with home-grown thugs who exploited the new state government’s lax oversight to build their own fiefdoms. Madhu Koda, one of Jharkhand’s former chief ministers, is awaiting trial on allegations he siphoned $1 billion from state coffers — an astonishing 20 percent of the state’s revenues — during his two-year tenure. Mining operations, fast-tracked without regard for environmental or safety concerns, expanded at an alarming rate and are now projected to displace at least half a million people in Jharkhand by 2015.

The blighted landscape has proved to be fertile ground for the Maoist insurgency’s renaissance. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Maoists’ predecessors in the Naxalite movement had waged a bloody revolutionary campaign across rural India, only to mostly fade away by the early 1990s. The Maoists who have picked up the Naxalites’ banner in recent years are different, and the contours of their rebellion are hard to pin down.

These fighters claim to be led in battle by an elusive figure called Kishenji, who depending on whom you ask is either a one-legged, battle-hardened Brahmin, a 1960s-era radical with a Ph.D. from New Delhi, or simply a moniker used by anyone within the organization who wishes to sound authoritative or confuse the police. The guerrillas shun email and mobile phones and rarely communicate with the world beyond the jungle, mostly via letters ferried back and forth by foot soldiers. Over several years of attempted correspondence, we received only a few missives in return. All were written in an opaque style full of the sort of arcane Marxist jargon that the rest of the world forgot in the 1970s.

Today’s Maoists maintain the radical leftist politics of their predecessors and draw their civilian support from the same rural grievances — poverty, lack of justice, political disenfranchisement. But they are less an organized ideological movement than a loose confederation of militias, and many of their local commanders appear to be in it for the money alone. They wage war sporadically across a 1,000-mile swath of India, operating without a permanent base, relying on the tacit support of villagers to evade the police and paramilitary forces that hunt them, and periodically raiding remote police stations for resupplies of arms and ammunition.

But the rebels’ primary revenue comes from the region’s mines. Where the Naxalites used to congregate in areas with longstanding conflicts between landowners and laborers, Maoist strongholds now tend to pop up within striking distance of large-scale extractive operations. Such mines cover vast areas and are difficult to secure, making them sitting ducks for well-armed insurgents. “Most of the mines in this state are in the forests, so we are easy targets,” says Deepak Kumar, the owner of several such mines in Jharkhand. “The only way to stop the attacks is to negotiate.”

Kumar comes from a long line of Jharkhandi robber barons. In the 1980s, he used his mining camps as staging grounds for stalking the region’s near-extinct Bengal tigers. Today he owns a series of profitable but (by his own admission) illegal coal mines, hidden in the palm forests. Legal mines extract ore with giant machines that carve craters to the horizon; Kumar’s are more like secret caves, the coal dug out of deep tunnels with pickaxes by day laborers working for $2 to $3 a day. He told us his revenues run about $4 million a year, typical for off-the-books operations in a state where less than half of raw materials are extracted legitimately.

On July 4, 2004, Kumar was closing out the day’s accounts in his makeshift office at one of his mines when seven female guerrillas carrying automatic rifles broke down his door, forcing him into the forest at gunpoint. They marched him to a riverbed, where they stopped and held a gun to his head. “I thought I was going to die,” he recalls. Instead they demanded $2.5 million for his ransom.

Through the night, the Maoists marched him barefoot over crisscrossing trails, until they happened across a police patrol that was searching for him. Kumar escaped in the ensuing gun battle. But after he returned to work several weeks later, Maoist negotiators knocked on his door and let him know he was still a target. So, Kumar told us, he quickly hashed out a business arrangement with the rebels: In exchange for their leaving his operation alone, he would pay them 5 percent of his revenues.

The protection money, like the small bribes Kumar says he pays to the police to avoid troublesome safety and environmental regulations, has simply become another operating cost. Kumar says that every mine owner he knows pays up, too. By his back-of-the-envelope approximation, if the other estimated 2,500 illegal mines in the state are doling out comparable kickbacks to the rebels, the Maoists’ annual take would come to $500 million — enough to keep a militant movement alive indefinitely. “It works like a tax,” he says with a Cheshire grin, “just another business expense and now everything runs smoothly.”

Calls by politicians to clamp down on the Maoists’ extortion racket ring hollow as long as the politicians themselves are running the same sort of scheme — and in Jharkhand, they often are. Shibu Soren, a former national minister for coal and chief minister of Jharkhand until he was removed from office in May, has been tried for murder three times, though he was ultimately acquitted. (The crimes’ witnesses had a habit of disappearing, or turning up dead.) Last year, local newspapers exposed a case in which two henchmen of another local politician assassinated a children’s development aid worker, reportedly because he refused to pay the obligatory 10 percent kickback of his dairy goods after receiving a government contract. What they would have done with 3,000 gallons of milk is anyone’s guess.

“If you want to be somebody in Jharkhand, just kill an aid worker,” T.P. Singh, a Jharkhand correspondent for the Sahara Samay cable network, told us. A large man with a thick mustache, a TV-ready cocksure grin, and a penetrating stare, Singh is the network’s crime and corruption exposé king, and a celebrity in the region. He plays the role of the TV cowboy to the hilt, right down to the ubiquitous ten-gallon hat he was wearing when we met him at the local press club in the Jharkhandi mining city of Hazaribagh to ask about the dangers of reporting on powerful people in a land with no effective laws.

“You know how I get those boys to respect me?” Singh replied. “With this.” He reached into the waistband underneath his knee-length kurta and pulled out a Dirty Harry six-shooter, loaded and ready for action. A former Maoist turned politician, sitting on a couch across from Singh awaiting an interview, nodded his solemn approval.

The act is part bluster, but also part necessity. Many of Singh’s media compatriots in Jharkhand have been killed, kidnapped, or threatened with death by the Maoists, miners, politicians, or all three at some point in their careers. In some areas, local law enforcement has simply ceded authority to government-sanctioned civilian militias, which are often accused by locals of pillaging even more rapaciously than the Maoists — and contributing to the fighting by arming poor villagers. The most feared among them is Salwa Judum, secretly assembled by the Chhattisgarh government in 2005 to fight the Maoists; its 5,000-odd members patrol the state armed with everything from AK-47s to axes. Some roam the forest with bows and arrows.

“The Maoists have been killing locals for years,” Mahendra Karma, the founder of Salwa Judum, told us. “But when [Salwa Judum members] kill Maoists or Maoist supporters, all of a sudden people shout the word ‘human rights.’ There should be no double standard. If we kill a Maoist, then how is that a violation of human rights?”

Karma has the thick frame and round face of a heavyweight boxer a decade past his prime. When we met him in his office, far from the fighting, in Chhattisgarh’s capital of Raipur, he was flanked by armed guards. Above his desk was a life-size portrait of Mahatma Gandhi.

Karma founded the militia in 2005, when he was opposition leader in the state parliament. In the years since, he has presided over his district’s descent into a war zone, as the Maoists and Salwa Judum have taken turns torching villages and raping and killing hundreds of people each year in a spiral of revenge attacks. Some villages have been attacked more than 15 times by one side or the other. Salwa Judum members are also accused of extracurricular killing to settle personal scores, even dressing the bodies in Maoist uniforms to cover up their crimes.

When we met, Karma was happy at first to talk about the militia. But when our questions turned probing, his mood soured. Finally, rising to his feet and jabbing his finger into our chests, he shouted, “These questions you ask have come from the Naxalites — you are the men of the Naxalites!” In Chhattisgarh, Karma’s rage could easily amount to an extrajudicial death sentence. We were on the first flight back to Delhi.

It was just as well because by that point our attempts to contact anyone in the Maoist rebel camps had yielded next to nothing. After leftist author Arundhati Roy paid a visit to the Maoists this year, the Indian government reinterpreted its anti-terrorism laws to make speaking favorably about the rebels or their ideological aims — including opposition to corporate mining — punishable by up to 10 years in prison. This has made the Maoists’ civilian allies cagey about dealing with outsiders, and the already reclusive fighters even more difficult to reach. After months of sporadic contact with the Maoists’ liaisons, exchanging handwritten notes with couriers who arrived at our Ranchi hotel in the middle of the night, we made a breakthrough: Finally, a rebel spokesman by the nom de guerre of Gopal offered the prospect of visiting a Maoist camp. It would involve being whisked deep into the jungle on the back of a motor scooter and then camping out there for several days, waiting for the rebels to make contact, blindfold us, and take us the rest of the way to their outpost. We were ready to do it, but monsoon rains and a Green Hunt military offensive eventually scotched the plan.

Since then, the Maoists have kept busy. In addition to the May bus explosion near Bailadila that killed 35 people, the passenger-train derailment that same month killed almost 150 people, bringing total casualties to more than 800 so far in 2010 alone. The central government has responded by dispatching even more military resources to the area.

In a sense, however, India has already lost this war. It has lost it gradually, over the last 20 years, by mistaking industrialization for development — by thinking that it could launch its economy into the 21st century without modernizing its political structures and justice system along with it, or preventing the corruption that worsens the inequality that development aid from New Delhi is supposed to rectify. The government is sending in Army advisors and equipment — for now, the war is being fought by the Indian equivalent of a national guard, not the Army proper — and spending billions of dollars on infrastructure projects in the districts where the Maoists are strongest. But it hasn’t addressed the concerns that drove the residents of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand into the guerrillas’ arms in the first place — concerns that are often shockingly basic.

In the town of Jamshedpur we visited Naveen Kumar Singh, a superintendent of police who can boast of a string of hard-won victories over the Maoists, which include demolishing training camps, confiscating weapons, and racking up a double-digit body count. But Singh is also responsible for winning his district’s hearts and minds. When we stopped by his office, 10 petitioners were lined up in front of his desk. They were mostly poor men and women from rural areas, their clothes dusty from long bus rides. One woman in a purple sari arrived with a limp, leaning heavily on her son’s shoulders. She asked Singh for help moving forward a police investigation into the car that hit her. Everyone in the room knew that without his signature on her crumpled forms, nothing would happen.

But Singh looked bored and sifted idly through the woman’s handwritten papers. Finally, he waved his hand in the air and told her to go find more documents, ushering her back into the endless bureaucratic loop that is India’s legal system. Most of the others received similar treatment.

Later, we asked him what the police were doing to combat the Maoists. When the police go on missions now, he told us, they pass out literature to the mostly illiterate peasantry and staple on every tree slogans warning people away from Maoism. “We don’t only go into the forest to kill people,” he bragged. “We also hang posters.”

Death and Madness at Diamond Mountain

People come from all over the world to Arizona’s Diamond Mountain University, hoping to master Tibetan teachings and achieve peace of mind. For some, the search for enlightenment can go terribly wrong.

Ian Thorson was dying of dehydration on an Arizona mountaintop, and his wife, Christie McNally, didn’t think he was going to make it. At six in the morning she pressed the red SOS button on an emergency satellite beacon. Five hours later a search-and-rescue helicopter thumped its way to the stranded couple. Paramedics with medical supplies rappelled off the hovering aircraft, but Thorson was already dead when they arrived. McNally required hospitalization. The two had endured the elements inside a tiny, hollowed-out cave for nearly two months. To keep the howling winds and freak snowstorms at bay, they had dismantled a tent and covered the cave entrance with the loose cloth. Fifty yards below, in a cleft in the rock face, they had stashed a few plastic tubs filled with supplies. Even though they considered themselves Buddhists in the Tibetan tradition, an oversize book on the Hindu goddess Kali lay on the cave floor. When they moved there, McNally and Thorson saw the cave as a spiritual refuge in the tradition of the great Himalayan masters. Their plan was as elegant as it was treacherous: They would occupy the cave until they achieved enlightenment. They didn’t expect they might die trying.

Almost irrespective of the actual spiritual practices on the Himalayan plateau, the West’s fascination with all things Tibetan has spawned movies, spiritual studios, charity rock concerts and best-selling books that range from dense philosophical texts to self-help guides and methods to Buddha-fy your business. It seems as if almost everyone has tried a spiritual practice that originated in Asia, either through a yoga class, quiet meditation or just repeating the syllable om to calm down. For many, the East is an antidote to Western anomie, a holistic counterpoint to our chaotic lives. We don stretchy pants, roll out yoga mats and hit the meditation cushion on the same day that we argue about our cell phone bill with someone in an Indian call center. Still, we look to Asian wisdom to center ourselves, to decompress and to block off time to think about life’s bigger questions. We trust that the teachings are authentic and hold the key to some hidden truth. We forget that the techniques we practice today in superheated yoga studios and air-conditioned halls originated in foreign lands and feudal times that would be unrecognizable to our modern eyes: eras when princely states went to war over small points of honor, priests dictated social policy and sending a seven-year-old to live out his life in a monastery was considered perfectly ordinary.

Yoga, meditation, chakra breathing and chanting are powerful physical and mental exercises that can have profound effects on health and well-being. On their own they are neither good nor bad, but like powerful lifesaving drugs, they also have the potential to cause great harm. As the scholar Paul Hackett of Columbia University once told me, “People are mixing and matching religious systems like Legos. And the next thing you know, they have some fairly powerful psychological and physical practices contributing to whatever idiosyncratic attitude they’ve come to. It is no surprise people go insane.” No idea out of Asia has as much power to capture our attention as enlightenment. It is a goal we strive toward, a sort of perfection of the soul, mind and body in which every action is precise and meaningful. For Tibetans seeking enlightenment, the focus is on the process. Americans, for whatever reason, search for inner peace as though they’re competing in a sporting event. Thorson and McNally pursued it with the sort of gusto that could break a sprinter’s leg. And they weren’t alone. More than just the tragedy of obscure meditators who went off the rails in nowhere Arizona, Thorson’s death holds lessons for anyone seeking spiritual solace in an unfamiliar faith.

Until February 2012, McNally and Thorson were rising stars among a small community of Tibetan Buddhist meditators and yoga practitioners who had come to the desert to escape the scrutiny and chaos of the city in order to focus on spiritual development. McNally was a founding member of Diamond Mountain University and Retreat Center – a small campus of yurts, campers, temples and retreat cabins that sprawls over two rocky valleys adjacent to historic Fort Bowie in Arizona. In the past decade Diamond Mountain has risen from obscurity to become one of the best known, if controversial, centers for Tibetan Buddhism in the United States. Its supreme spiritual leader is Michael Roach, an Arizona native, Princeton graduate and former diamond merchant who took up monk’s robes in the 1980s and remains one of this country’s most enthusiastic evangelists for Tibetan Buddhism. McNally was Roach’s most devoted student, his lover, his spiritual consort and, eventually, someone he recognized as a living goddess. For 14 months McNally led one of the most ambitious meditation retreats in the Western world. Starting in December 2010 she and 38 other retreat participants pledged to cut off all direct contact with the rest of the planet and meditate under vows of silence for three years, three months and three days. Unwilling to speak, they wrote down all their communications. Phone lines, airconditioning and the Internet were off-limits.

The only way they could communicate with their families was through postal drops once every two weeks. The strict measures were intended to remove the distractions that infiltrate everyday life and allow the retreatants a measure of quiet to focus on the structure of their minds. Thorson’s death might have gone unnoticed by the world if, days after, Matthew Remski, a yoga instructor, Internet activist and former member of the group, had not begun to raise questions about the retreat’s safety on the well-known Buddhist blog Elephant Journal. He called for Roach to step down from Diamond Mountain’s board of directors and for state psychologists to evaluate the remaining 30-odd retreatants. His posting received a deluge of responses from current and former members, some of whom alleged sexual misconduct by Roach and made accusations of black magic and mind control.

Roach rose to prominence in the late 1990s after the great but financially impoverished Tibetan monastery Sera Mey conferred on him a geshe degree, the highest academic qualification in Tibetan Buddhism. Conversant in Russian, Sanskrit and Tibetan, he was an ideal messenger to bring Buddhism to the West and was widely acclaimed for his ability to translate complex philosophical ideas into plain English. He was the first American to receive the title, which ordinarily takes some 20 years of intensive study. In his case, he was urged by his teacher, the acclaimed monk Khen Rinpoche, to spend time outside the monastery, in the business world. At his teacher’s command, Roach took a job at Andin International Diamond Corporation, buying and selling precious stones. According to a book Roach co-authored with McNally, The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Managing Your Business and Your Life, in 15 years he grew the firm from a small-time company to a giant global operation that generated annual revenue in excess of $100 million. The book cites a teaching called “The Diamond Sutra,” in which the Buddha looks at diamonds, with their clarity and strength, as symbolic of the perfection of wisdom. But the diamond industry, particularly during the years Roach was active in it, is one of the dirtiest in the world – fueling wars in Africa and linked to millions of deaths.

During a lecture Roach gave in Phoenix last June, I asked him how he could reconcile his Buddhist ethics with making vast sums of money through violent supply chains. Roach stared at me with moist, sincere- looking eyes and avoided the question. “If your motivation is pure, then you can clean the environment you enter,” he said. “I wanted to work with diamonds. It was a 15-year metaphor, not a desire to make money. I wanted to do good in the world, so I worked in one of the hardest and most unethical environments.” It was the sort of answer that plays well with business clients. Rationalizations like this are not uncommon in industry, but they are for a Buddhist monk. If Roach was unorthodox, he was also indispensable. His business acumen might have been enough for some early critics to look the other way. His share of Andin’s profits was ample enough that he could funnel funds to Sera Mey to establish numerous charitable missions.

His blend of Buddhism and business made him an instant success on the lecture circuit, and even today he is comfortable in boardrooms in Taipei, Geneva, Hamburg and Kiev, lecturing executives on how behaving ethically in business will both make you rich and speeding the path of enlightenment. Ian Thorson had always been attracted to alternative spirituality, and he had a magnetic personality that made it easy for him to win friends. Still, “he was seeking something, and there was an element of that asceticism that existed long before he took to any formal practice of meditation, yoga and whatnot,” explains Mike Oristian, a friend of his from Stanford University. Oristian recounts in an email the story of a trip Thorson took to Indonesia, where he hoped a sacred cow might lick his eyes and cure his poor eyesight. It didn’t work, and Thorson later admitted to Oristian that “it was a long way to go only to have the feeling of sandpaper on his eyes.”

Roach gave Thorson a structure to his passion and a systematic way to think about his spiritual quest. After Thorson began studying Roach’s teachings in 1997, Oristian remembers, some of his spontaneous spark seemed to fade. Kay Thorson, Ian’s mother, had a different perspective. She suspected he had fallen under the sway of a cult and hired two anti-cult counselors to stage an intervention. In June 2000 they lured him to a house in Long Island and tried to get him to leave the group. “He was skinny, almost anorexic,” she says. They tried to show him he had options other than following Roach. For a time it seemed to work. Afterward he wrote to a friend about his family’s attempt to deprogram him: “It’s so weird that my mom thinks I’m in a cult and so does Dad and so does my sister. They talk to me in soft voices, like a mental patient, and tell me that the people aren’t ill-intentioned, just misguided.” For almost five years he traveled through Europe, working as a translator and tutor, but he never completely severed ties. Eventually he made his way back to Roach’s fold. In 1996, when she was only two years out of New York University, Christie McNally dropped any plans she’d had to pursue an independent career and became Roach’s personal attendant, spending every day with him and organizing his increasingly busy travel schedule. And though his growing base of followers didn’t know it, she would soon be sharing Roach’s bed.

The couple married in a secret ceremony in Little Compton, Rhode Island in 1998. As had many charismatic teachers before him, Roach established a dedicated following. As it grew he planned an audacious feat that would take him out of the public eye and at the same time establish him in a lineage of high Himalayan masters. He announced that, from 2000 to 2003, he would put his lecturing career on hold and attempt enlightenment by going on a three-year meditation retreat along with five chosen students, among them Christie McNally. In many ways, Roach’s silence was more powerful than his words. Three years, three months and three days went by, and Roach’s reputation grew. Word of mouth about his feat helped expand the patronage of Diamond Mountain and the Asian Classics Institute, which distributed his teachings through audio recordings and online courses.

Every six months he emerged to teach breathless crowds about his meditating experiences. At those events he was blindfolded but spoke eloquently on the nature of emptiness. Finally, on 16 January 2003 he dropped two bombshells in a poem he addressed to the Dalai Lama and published in an open letter. In his first revelation he claimed that after intensive study of tantric practices he had seen emptiness directly and was on the path to becoming a bodhisattva, a sort of Tibetan angel. The word tantra derives from Sanskrit and indicates secret ritualized teachings that can be a shortcut to advanced spiritual powers. The second revelation was that while in seclusion he had discovered that his student Christie McNally was an incarnation of Vajrayogini, the Tibetan diamond-like deity, and that he had taken her as his spiritual consort and wife. They had taken vows never to be more than 15 feet from each other for the rest of their lives and even to eat off the same plate. In light of her scant qualifications as a scholar, Roach legitimized McNally by bestowing her with the title of “lama,” a designation for a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism.

These revelations severely split the Tibetan Buddhist community. The reprimands were swift and forceful. Several respected lamas demanded that he hand back his monk’s robes. Others, including Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who heads the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, a large and wealthy group of Tibetan Buddhists, advised that he prove his claims by publicly showing the miraculous powers that are said to come with enlightenment – or be declared a heretic. That Zopa Rinpoche was one of Roach’s greatest mentors made the criticism all the more pertinent and scathing. Robert Thurman, a professor of religious studies at Columbia University, met with Roach and McNally shortly after Roach published his open letter. He was concerned that Roach had broken his vows and that his continuing as a monk could damage the reputation of the larger Tibetan Buddhist community. “I told him, ‘You can’t be a monk and have a girlfriend; you have clearly given up your vow,’” Thurman says. “To which he responded that he had never had genital contact with a human female. So I turned to her and asked if she was human or not. She said right away, ‘He said it. I didn’t.’ There was a pregnant pause, and then she said, ‘But can’t he do whatever he wants, since he has directly realized emptiness?’” On the phone I can hear Thurman consider his words and sigh. “It seemed like they had already descended into psychosis.”

Intensive retreats where monks meditate in isolated caves are mainstays of Buddhism in Tibet, where they are typically used to establish the credentials of an important teacher. However, such retreats make less sense outside Tibet’s historically feudal world. The human mind is reasonably fragile, and isolation can act like an echo chamber. For the retreatants, Diamond Mountain was a ritualized place where they could try to sharpen their minds to see as little of the ordinary world as possible and allow their visualizations to be the focus of their daily life. For better or worse, Roach and McNally emerged from their first great retreat as different people than when they began. Much of the explanation for this comes down to physical changes in the brain. In its purest form meditation is a way to look at the mind in isolation. By calming the body and watching thoughts come and go, an experienced meditator can uncover astonishing things in his or her physiology and psychology. Meditation is a little like putting your mind in a laboratory and seeing what it does on its own. Although everyone’s experience is different, it is common to see walls shift, hear noises that aren’t there, observe changes in the quality of light or have time inexplicably speed up or slow down. Neuroscientists have discovered that over the long term meditating can cause changes in the composition of brain matter, and even short stints can create significant physical alterations in one’s neurological makeup.

Whatever changes occur during short, daily meditations are only amplified on silent retreats. Although comprehensive clinical studies on the potential adverse side effects of such retreats are just getting under way (one led by Willoughby Britton, a neuroscientist at Brown University, is in its second year), it is clear that some people find the isolation and mental introspection too intense. Some lose touch with reality or fall into psychotic states. The world generally embraces meditation as a method of self-help, but a 1984 study by Stanford University psychologist Leon Otis of 574 subjects involved in Transcendental Meditation (one of the more benign forms)showed that 70 percent of longtime meditators displayed signs of mental disorders. Another explanation is that our expectations for meditation are often too grand. From a young age we are steeped in tales of superheroes and jedis who are able to perform great feats through their innate specialness and intensive study. We hear stories of levitating yogis and the power of chakras, tai chi and badass Shaolin monks, and quietly think to ourselves that maybe anything is possible.

McNally’s speedy elevation to Vajrayogini and lama mirrors those nascent desires. For those who aren’t instantly anointed, the religion offers a clear method: Meditate often, keep your vows and, if you’re in a hurry, start practicing tantra. From a certain standpoint Roach’s approach was a success. Members of the group noted that during the period when Roach and McNally were in a relationship, attendance at events and lectures was never higher. They taught together, and their mutual confidence and earnestness seemed to be an open door to enlightenment. If it was okay to take a spiritual partner along for the ride, couples could join and work on their spiritual practice together instead of following the more orthodox custom of practicing alone.

After the 2003 retreat, Roach and McNally continued to forge a spiritual path that, to outside observers, looked less like Tibetan Buddhism and more like a new faith that mixed elements of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and good oldfashioned showmanship. They co-authored half a dozen books on Tibetan meditation, yoga and business ethics, one of which attained best-seller status. Sid Johnson, a musician who was briefly on the board of directors of Diamond Mountain, worried that the group was becoming too focused on magical thinking. His concerns came to a head in 2005 during a secret initiation into the practice of the bull-headed tantric deity Yamantaka, whose name translates as “destroyer of death.” As part of a four-day ritual, all the initiates had to meet privately with Geshe Michael and Lama Christie, as their students called them, in a yurt for their final empowerment, which would help them conquer death. Johnson was nervous when he entered the room wearing a blindfold and heard Roach ask him to lie down on their bed. When he did so, McNally started to massage his chakras, starting with his head and ending at his penis. “I’m not sure who undid my pants, but it was part of the blessing,” says Johnson. When they were done, he sat up – still wearing the blindfold – and felt McNally’s lips pressing against his. They kissed. “There is a part of the initiation when your lama offers you a consort, and the way Geshe Michael teaches it, the things that happen in the metaphysical world also have to happen in the real one,” says Johnson. Afterward, he says, they all giggled like children at a summer camp, as though they were breaking taboos and no one else would know. Ten minutes later Johnson left and they asked Johnson’s wife to come in alone. Altogether, almost 20 students had private initiation by the couple that night.

By most accounts McNally began to take center stage in the spiritual road show. It was as though Roach was stepping back and allowing his partner to teach philosophy and meditation in his stead. “He seemed distracted and unengaged whenever she would speak, just staring at the ceiling while she was talking, as if distancing himself from whatever Christie was saying,” says Michael Brannan, another longtime student and current full-time volunteer at Diamond Mountain. “He called her Vajrayogini. Can you imagine being promoted to deity by your spouse and guru?” Even though she was a lama, McNally wanted to prove she could be a leader on her own. She pressed for a second great retreat, this one even more ambitious than the first. Instead of only a few humble yurts on a desolate property, they would build dozens of highly efficient self-cooling solar-powered structures – permanent infrastructure on Diamond Mountain property that could host scores of retreatants for long periods. Roach and McNally planned to lead 38 people into the desert on a quest to see emptiness directly. They had no problem finding followers to foot the bill. Participants were required to build and pay for their own cabins, with the expectation that when they were done with their retreat, ownership of the cabins would revert to Diamond Mountain. Modestly priced cabins cost around $100,000, while more lavish spaces hovered closer to $300,000. Volunteers and contractors labored on the designs for several years while Roach and McNally prepped the spiritual seekers with philosophy and meditation techniques.

By the middle of 2010, plans for the second great retreat were coming together, but Roach and McNally’s relationship was falling apart. The reasons for the split are unclear. Members of the group speak about illicit sexual liaisons between Roach and other students and covert theological power struggles. No one knows for sure, and neither Roach nor McNally commented on the split for this story, but the fallout reverberated through the community. Michael Brannan remembers “a lot of people just sort of swapped partners,” including McNally. Former member Ekan Thomason remembers that Thorson dropped off his then girlfriend at her house with a sleeping bag and disappeared into the desert. The next time Thomason saw Thorson, he and McNally were dancing under a disco ball at a party at the Diamond Mountain temple. In October 2010 McNally and Thorson married in a Christian ceremony in Montauk, New York. Faced with being confined on a silent retreat with his ex-wife, Roach quietly backed away from his commitment to participate and gave over leadership of the affair to McNally. For McNally the second great desert retreat would be a major testing ground for her as a spiritual leader. At its conclusion she would have had almost seven years of silent meditation under her belt, a qualification few Buddhist practitioners – even in Tibet – can claim. With 38 people looking to her for spiritual guidance, including a new husband for whom she was guru, goddess and wife, she needed to impart something special. She found her answer outside Tibetan Buddhism, in the Hindu goddess Kali.

Kali isn’t an ordinary member of the Hindu pantheon. Although a few major temples, including the famous Dakshinewar Kali Temple in Calcutta, are devoted to her worship, most mainstream Hindus invoke her name only in times of violence or war. In the 1700s British colonialists popularized and exaggerated stories of Kali worshippers called thuggee (from which we get the English word thug), who murdered unsuspecting travelers on isolated roads and used their bodies in sacrifices to the goddess to gain magical powers. The few Hindus steeped in tantric practice – usually quite different from Buddhist tantra – will sometimes appeal to Kali for female spiritual power, called Shakti. Although Kali is considered untamable, wild and dangerous, it seems McNally wanted to add the goddess to her tantric meditation in order to speed her journey to enlightenment.

In October 2009 McNally staged a 10-day Kali initiation with more than 100 prospective devotees. She decorated the temple with weapons: swords, guns, crossbows, chain saws and menacing-looking garden implements meant to show the violent side of the deity. In a symbolic rite reminiscent of India’s now-banned thuggee cult, members were “kidnapped” on the road between holy sites and stuffed into a small wooden box to heighten their fear. Roach held his own version of the ritual nearby as Ekan Thomason met Lama Christie in a structure called Lama Dome. There, McNally gave her a medical lancet. “Kali requires something from you. She requires your blood,” McNally said, reminding Thomason of a beautiful swashbuckling pirate as she ran a finger across the sharp edge of the knife. The ceremony was designed to be terrifying, and participants were split in their reactions. Some had accepted McNally as an infallible teacher and hoped to learn despite the theatrics. Others worried that Diamond Mountain was turning toward a dark, occult version of Hinduism. But a year later almost 40 retreatants would lock themselves in a valley under Lama Christie’s sole spiritual direction. In the months leading up to the retreat in 2010 the group showed signs of stress as members became increasingly confused between the spiritual world they were trying to access through meditation and the real world, where actions had predictable consequences.

Under Roach and McNally’s direction they threw parties in the temple at which they served “nectar,” specially blessed booze they could drink despite their vows of abstinence. At one of these parties some members, who wish to remain anonymous, say they saw Roach and McNally perform miracles – allegedly walking through a wall of the temple building by bending the laws of space and time. Such stories became commonplace around the camp, and the communal hysteria vaulted Roach and McNally to godlike status. Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, co-authors of The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, explain these perceived miracles on a psychological level. Kramer says, “People can convince themselves they have seen many things that are really just projections of their own mind.” Alstad adds that disciples give their mental energy to a guru and the guru reflects the energy back to them. It seems likely that McNally learned to see the world through Roach’s lens. “Roach took her mind over – or she gave it to him,” says Alstad. “That’s what followers do: They totally surrender. She surrendered to him as a young, unformed woman. And a similar process was probably reversed between Thorson and McNally. She was his lama, his guru and his wife.”

When the retreat started, no one had much of an idea how their relationship would hold up. Then, in March 2011, after three months of silence, Thorson knocked on the door of a retreatant who was a nurse practitioner. He was bleeding profusely from three stab wounds. She was afraid to treat him and recommended he go to a hospital. But the second person to see him, a doctor on retreat, reluctantly tended to the slashes on his torso and shoulder. The wounds were so deep, the doctor said, they “threatened vital organs.” At the time, McNally and Thorson gave no explanation for how it happened, but soon rumors of domestic abuse began to circulate in the same hushed whispers as the talk about Roach’s supposed sexual liaisons with various students. With most people under vows of silence, it is no surprise that almost a year passed before the event became publicly known. In February 2012, Lama Christie recused herself from her vow of silence to give a public lecture on her realizations during meditation. Wearing her trademark white robes and with a silken blindfold across her eyes, she sat on a throne and talked about the spiritual lessons she had learned while grappling with an increasingly unstable and violent relationship.

In an act she described as playful, McNally said she stabbed Thorson three times with a knife they had received as a wedding present. He could have died in the exchange, and few people in the crowd could grasp what the lesson was supposed to mean. Could violence be a route to their ultimate spiritual goals? Had their teacher gone crazy? Referencing her newfound grasp of the goddess Kali, she asked the crowd to learn from her experience with violence. Although the original recording of her talk has been taken off the Internet, she later explained the incident in a public letter: “I simply did not understand that the knife could actually cut someone… I was actively trying to raise up this aggressive energy, a kind of fierce divine pride… It was all divine play to me.” She went on to write about the tantric lessons Kali had taught her through the event and how she was trying to cope with occasional violence in her relationship with Thorson.

Jigme Palmo, a nun who sits on Diamond Mountain’s board of directors, stated later that the board was worried the focus on violence might spur other meditators down a dangerous path. The directors immediately convened emergency meetings and discussed various plans of action. “It was an impossible situation,” says Palmo. “We didn’t know what was happening inside the retreat, and yet the board was ultimately responsible if something went wrong.” They consulted a lawyer and sent urgent written messages to McNally asking for more information about domestic violence and her increasingly erratic decisions. Suddenly aware that her teachings had created a rift in the community, McNally tried to shore up her control of the meditators by banning all correspondence with the outside world. She ordered that all mail deliveries cease and instructed the retreatants to refuse contact with their families. The board members decided they had no choice but to act unilaterally to remove McNally from her role as teacher and to remove McNally and Thorson from the retreat itself. The board sent them a letter explaining their decision and gave McNally and Thorson an hour to pack their things and leave, offering to cover their relocation expenses, including hotel costs, a rental car, prepaid cell phones and $3,600 cash. The message was clear: Get out now.

But McNally and Thorson had taken vows to stay in Diamond Mountain’s consecrated area, and they had a different plan. Instead of leaving, McNally and Thorson planned to find a nearby cave where they could continue to meditate and still have contact with some of McNally’s students. Before they made their final arrangements to leave, McNally met privately with Michael Brannan to discuss the board’s decision. McNally kept her vow of silence, and the two passed notes back and forth, creating an effective transcript of her thoughts at the time. The document, which Brannan shared with me, sheds light on McNally’s state of mind. In it she mentions ordinations that took place and the pressure that people – especially Thorson – felt while they were “locked up” on retreat. But it all also fit into a broader plan. “Everything is perfect, you’ll see” she begins, adding, “I have inherited my holy lama’s [Roach’s] style of pushing people past their breaking point.” She blames her former husband for having “stoked the fire” and making people fear her as a teacher.

Perhaps the real problem was her former lover’s jealousy over her current husband. She then disappeared without any further communication with the board of directors or most of the other retreatants. She, Thorson and two attendants hauled gear up a rugged mountainside. They found an ancient cave just out of sight of the retreat valley where they could finish their three years of silent meditation unobserved. The few people they let in on the secret promised to ferry them supplies as needed. Water would be placed at strategic points where one of them could retrieve it without being seen. Objectively, the decision to live out the rest of the retreat on an Arizona mountainside was fatal from its inception. Sergeant David Noland, who coordinated the rescue effort, has seen 36 people die of dehydration or exposure to the elements in his county in the past three years. “At that point a death was inevitable,” he says. The cabins at Diamond Mountain were built with the environment in mind, but the pockmark in the rock where McNally and Thorson laid their sleeping bags was exposed. For two months the couple was battered alternately by rain, wind and snow. Though their decision proved to be fatal, McNally and Thorson weren’t suicidal. They thought they were exceptional and the rules for ordinary humans didn’t apply anymore. They were on the cusp of greatness. Enlightenment was within reach.

Three days before Thorson died, McNally’s supporters published a 31-page manifesto she had written, titled “A Shift in the Matrix,” in which she explains their spiritual lessons over the past year. She writes: “One of the highest tantric vows there is is the vow of how you should see your lama and how to behave toward them. When you are with a partner, your partner becomes your highest lama. So I have been [Ian’s] lama for many years, but he recently became mine as well. Your lama is unquestionably a divine being and your job at all times is to fight any desire to see them in a lesser way. You should trust your lama with your life, and totally surrender to them”. To them their cave was a challenge they would overcome together, a sacred location in the tradition of the high Himalayan lamas, whose asceticism and hardships were a path to greatness. McNally and Thorson had been running low on water and began to drink brown, polluted runoff rainwater. On the morning of 22 April 2012, Thorson wouldn’t wake up, and McNally activated the emergency distress beacon she had packed. Thorson was barely breathing. It would take another seven hours for the search-and-rescue team to bring them down off the mountainside. An autopsy would eventually attribute Thorson’s death to dehydration. His corpse weighed only 100 pounds, but McNally did not want to be separated from it and fought the police and mortician with fists and tears when they tried to take it into custody.

McNally recuperated in a hospital in nearby Wilcox, Arizona. Several days later she vanished. Rumors have flown that she is on another silent retreat, meditating on the meaning of her husband’s death. According to various accounts, she is in the Bahamas, South America, Colorado, Kathmandu or California, but no one really knows what she is doing or if she is safe. I saw Roach one more time, during a one-day stopover in Phoenix on my way back to California. He had avoided my emails and requests the entire time I was in Arizona, and this was my only chance to have a private word with him. His lecture that night, on the importance of mindfulness, lasted three hours, and when he was done I got in line behind a 50-ish Indian woman carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag. She chatted with other people in the line and examined a beaded necklace she hoped Roach would bless. “I can’t believe I’m going to meet the enlightened one,” she said excitedly. When it was my turn I stood in front of his throne and introduced myself. I tried to phrase a question about how he was dealing with Thorson’s death. “It was a very sad event,” he said, “but why are people not interested in my teaching? One person dies in the desert and suddenly everyone pays attention. People should be talking about all the good works that I’ve done instead.” It wasn’t a satisfying answer. It was as if Roach couldn’t take a minute to reflect on the profundity of what had happened. To him it may just have been karma ripening, and perhaps the story didn’t end when someone died in the desert. It might have just begun.

Originally published at Playboy

Read the book, too! The Enlightenment Trap

The Iceman Cometh

A dilapidated farmhouse in the Polish countryside creaks and groans on its foundation as six men hyperventilate inside one of its frigid rooms. The windows are caked with frost and snow piles up outside the front door. Wim Hof surveys his students with stern blue eyes as he counts their breaths. They are lying in sleeping bags and covered in blankets. Every breath they expel appears as a tiny puff of mist as the heat of their bodies crystallizes in the near-arctic air. When the students are bleached white from exhaustion, Hof commands them to let all the air out of their lungs and hold their breath until their bodies shake and shudder. I exhale all my breath into the frigid air.

“Fainting is okay,” he says. “It just means you went deep.”

Hof is one of the world’s most recognized extremophiles. In 2007 he made headlines around the world when he attempted to summit Mount Everest wearing nothing but spandex shorts and hiking boots. He has run barefoot marathons in the arctic circle and submerged his entire body beneath the ice for almost two hours. Every feat defies the boundaries of what medical science says is possible. Hof believes he is much more than a stuntman performing tricks; he thinks he has stumbled on hidden evolutionary potential locked inside every human body.

With my lungs empty and my head dizzy from hyperventilation, I note the stopwatch on my iPad as it slowly ticks by the seconds. At 30 seconds I want to let go and feel the cool air rush inside, but I hold on.

Participants have come from across Europe and America for this seven-day training program aimed at extending control over the body’s autonomic processes. The human body performs most of its daily functions on autopilot. Whether it’s regulating internal temperature, setting the steady pace of a heartbeat or rushing lymph and blood to a limb when it’s injured, the body, like a computer, uses preset responses for most external stimuli. Hof’s training aims to create a wedge between the body’s internal programming and external pressures in order to force the body to cede control to the conscious mind. He is a hacker, tweaking the body’s programming to expand its capabilities.

At 60 seconds, with empty lungs, my diaphragm begins to quiver and I have to rock back and forth to keep from gasping. Even so, my mind is strangely calm. My eyes are closed, and I see swirling red shapes behind my lids. Hof explains that the light is a window into my pituitary gland.

Hof promises he can teach people to hold their breath for five minutes and stay warm without clothes in freezing snow. With a few days of training I should be able to consciously control my immune system to ramp up against sicknesses or, if necessary, suppress it against autoimmune malfunctions such as arthritis and lupus. It’s a tall order, to be sure. The world is full of would-be gurus proffering miracle cures, and Hof’s promises sound superhuman.

The undertaking resonates with a male clientele willing to wage war on their bodies and pay $2,000 for the privilege of a weeklong program. Across the room Hans Spaan’s hands are shaking. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s 10 years ago, he had to quit his job as an IT executive, but he claims Hof’s method has enabled him to cut the amount of drugs his doctors insist he needs. Next to him, Andrew Lescelius, a Nebraskan whose asthma can be crippling, hasn’t used his inhaler for a week.

For almost an hour we’ve been cycling between hyperventilating and holding our breath. Every repetition has made it incrementally easier to hold on just a bit longer. Hof tells us the quick breathing adds oxygen to our blood supply so that, at least until we use it up, we don’t have to rely on the air in our lungs to survive. The autonomic urge to gasp for air is based on the mind’s ordinary programming: No air in the lungs means it’s time to breathe. My nervous system hasn’t yet realized there’s still air in my blood.

Ninety-two seconds and my vision starts to cloud over. The room has taken on a red sheen I don’t remember being there before. I may be seeing lights. I let go and allow air to rush in. It’s far from a record, but after only an hour of trying, it’s my longest attempt. I smile with a small sense of accomplishment.

Hof then commands us to undergo another breathing cycle, but this time, instead of holding my breath, he instructs me to do as many push-ups as I can. Raised on a diet of cheese curds and little exercise, I’m out of shape. At home I can manage an embarrassingly feeble 20 before collapsing. Now, with no air in my lungs, I push myself off the floor with almost no effort. They roll out one after another, and before I know it I’ve done 40

I decide I’m going to have to reevaluate everything I’ve ever thought about gurus. Hof is a difficult figure to dissect. On one level he speaks in a familiar creole of New Age mumbo jumbo. There’s a spiel about universal compassion and connection to divine energies. Then, of course, there are the results. His relatively simple exercises make undeniable changes in my body seemingly overnight. Following his prescriptions for a week, I hack my body to perform physical feats of endurance I didn’t think possible and earn confidence I didn’t know I had. As a bonus, I lose seven pounds of fat—which come out in oily clumps during my morning eliminations.

Our goal by the end of the week: to complete an arduous eight-hour climb up a powder-covered mountain, wearing nothing but shorts. It will be my own personal Everest, though in this case the mountain is called Sneˇzˇka. But even with these first routines in the safety of a training room, I’m not sure I’m up for it.

I am at the mercy of Hof, who wears a pointy green hat that makes him look like a life-size garden gnome. A bushy beard frames his piercing blue eyes and ruddy nose, and his body bristles with tightly corded muscles. A six-inch surgical scar across his stomach marks a time he took his training too far and ended up in the hospital. Hof is a savant and a madman. He’s a prophet and a foil. And as is occasionally the case with people who try to cultivate superpowers, Hof’s abilities have come at a heavy price.

Born in the Dutch city of Sittard in 1959, on the eve of Europe’s hippie revolution, Hof spent his early years in the middle of a working-class family of nine children. While the rest of the Hof family learned Catholic liturgy, Wim became fascinated with Eastern teachings, memorizing parts of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and scouring the Bhagavad Gita and Zen Buddhism for wisdom. He was keen on exploring the connections between the body and the mind, but none of what he read was quite what he was looking for.

Then, in the winter of 1979, when he was 20 years old, he was walking alone on a frosty morning in Amsterdam’s picturesque Beatrixpark when he noticed a thin skin of ice on one of the canals. He wondered what it would feel like if he jumped in. With juvenile impulsiveness he has never quite shed, he took off his clothes and plunged in naked. The shock was immediate, he says, but “the feeling wasn’t of cold; it was something like tremendous good. I was in the water only a minute, but time just slowed down. It felt like ages.” A wash of endorphins cruised through his system, and the high lasted through the afternoon. He went on to repeat the exercise every day since. “The cold is my teacher,” he says.

The breathing technique emerged naturally. He started by mimicking the rapid breaths people take instinctively when they plunge into icy water, which he says are similar to the breaths a woman takes during childbirth. In both cases the body switches to an instinctual program. When Hof dunked under the ice, he went from rapid breathing to holding his breath. That’s when he began to feel changes in his body.

The way Hof explains it, humans must have evolved with an innate ability to resist the elements. Our remote ancestors traversed icy mountains and parched deserts long before they invented the most basic footwear or animal-skin coats. While technology has made us more comfortable, the underlying biology is still there, and the key to unlocking our lost potential lies in re-creating the sorts of harsh experiences our ancestors would have faced.

Hof trained on his own in obscurity for 15 years, rarely talking about his growing abilities. His first student was his son Enahm. When Enahm was still an infant, Hof took him down to the canals and dunked him in the water like Achilles. While it’s anyone’s guess what nearby pedestrians might have thought of this sight, most of his close friends shrugged off his morning routines as just another eccentricity in an already eccentric city.

Hof did odd jobs, including working as a mail carrier, and took gigs as a canyoneering instructor in Spain during the summers. Money was always a problem, and his wife—a beautiful Basque woman named Olaya—began to show signs of a serious mental disorder. She was depressed. She heard voices. In July 1995 she jumped off the eighth floor of her parents’ apartment building in Pamplona on the first day of the Running of the Bulls.

Sitting at a handmade wooden table in what serves as lunchroom and breakfast nook in his Polish headquarters, Hof recounts Olaya’s death as tears roll freely down his cheeks. “Why would God take my wife from me?” he asks. Confronted with loss and a broken heart, he put all his faith into the one thing that set him apart from everyone else: his ability to control his body. Olaya had never shown interest in Hof’s methods, but he felt he could have done more to help her. “The inclination I have to train people now is because of my wife’s death,” says Hof. “I can bring people back to tranquility. Schizophrenia and multiple-personality disorder draw away people’s energy. My method can give them back control.” It was his call to action. But he still needed a way to announce himself to the world.

His opportunity came a few years later. As winter settled on Amsterdam, a local newspaper ran a series of articles about odd things people did in the snow. Hof called the editor and explained that for the past couple of decades he’d been skinny-dipping in icy water. The paper sent a reporter, and Hof jumped into a nearby lake he frequented. The next week a television crew showed up.

In one famous segment, Hof cut holes in the ice and jumped in while a Dutch news crew filmed. He was drying himself off when, a few meters away, a man stepped on a thin patch and fell through. Hof charged out onto the lake, jumped in a second time and dragged the man to safety. The news crew caught the exchange, and soon Hof wasn’t just a local oddity, he was a local hero. Someone dubbed him the Iceman, and the name stuck.

After that act of heroism, Hof became a household name across the Netherlands. A Dutch television program hosted by the eminent newscaster Willibrord Frequin asked Hof to perform on camera. The gimmick was to have Hof establish a Guinness world record. They planned for him to swim 50 meters beneath arctic ice without breathing. It would be sensationalist fun, but the program would air throughout Scandinavia and give Hof a shot at doing stunts for other channels around the world.

A few weeks later Hof stood on the surface of a frozen lake near the small village of Pello, Finland, a handful of miles from the arctic circle, wearing only a bathing suit. Although the temperature would drop to minus 12 degrees Fahrenheit, his skin glistened with sweat. Below him a diamond-shape hole shot down a meter through the ice. There were two other holes 25 and 50 meters from the first. A camera crew watched as Hof descended and dipped his toe in the periwinkle waters.

On the first day of shooting he was supposed to swim only to the first hole so the crew could get the right shots and feel comfortable with the safety setup. But Hof had other plans. He wanted to surprise and impress the crew by clearing the whole distance in one go. He had done his calculations in advance. One stroke took him one meter, so he would need to do 50 to reach his destination. Taking a giant gulp of air into his lungs, Hof disappeared and began his sprint.

He later recalled that he opened his eyes midway between the first and second hole and could make out a beam of sunlight slicing through the water. But at stroke 29, with the safety of the first hole and rescue team behind him, something went wrong. He hadn’t anticipated what the cold water would do to his eyes. His corneas began to freeze over, and crystallization blurred his vision. Five strokes later he was blind, with only his stroke count to direct him to oxygen. Soon he was off course. At 50 strokes he grabbed around in vain for the rim of the second hole. He turned around thinking maybe he had passed it. He wanted to gasp for air but knew the results would be fatal. At 65 strokes his hope was beginning to fade. Seventy strokes in, just as he began to lose consciousness, he felt a hand wrap around his ankle. A safety diver dragged him to the surface. He knew he had almost died and that his hubris had led him there. Despite that close call, the next day he would set a world record, with the cameras rolling.

The show went on to be a hit and secured him a series of similar on-air stunts for international channels from Discovery to National Geographic. But success came at a price. Although he was capable of incredible feats, Hof’s desire to impress and please the people around him would time and again lead him into near-fatal situations. Should he die, the world might never understand how he had achieved his dramatic results. Hof needed a better plan.

To understand Hof’s abilities, I board a plane from Los Angeles to Wrocaw, Poland, where he meets me at the terminal gate with a broad smile. Hof decided to make his headquarters here instead of the Netherlands so he could be close to icy streams and snow-covered mountains—and also take advantage of the weaker economy to purchase a larger space. We pile into a tiny gray Volkswagen with two other devotees—a Croatian and a Latvian—who have come to study his technique, and we traverse miles of Polish pines and picturesque villages toward Hof’s rural headquarters.

Janis Kuze sits crammed next to me with my hiking backpack overflowing onto his lap. The burly Latvian grew up amid the turmoil of a collapsing Soviet Union, when bandits roamed the countryside. His father stashed a loaded AK-47 beneath his son’s bed so it was never more than an instant away should they need to defend themselves. Now Kuze studies the Israeli combat system Krav Maga in his spare time and spars with his equally intimidating and, he assures me, beautiful girlfriend. Asked if he’s ready to immerse himself in ice water, he replies, “When my father was in the special forces, they tested soldiers’ ability to adapt by making them sit in ice water. If they survived, they passed. Not everyone passed.”

We arrive in the tiny village of Przesieka, where Hof owns an isolated farmhouse he was able to purchase after signing a sponsorship deal with Columbia Sportswear to shill a line of battery-heated jackets in 2011. In the commercials, which were created for TV but thrived on the internet, Hof swims in a frozen lake while giving icy stares to toasty outdoorsmen who use the high-tech gear to warm themselves with the touch of a button. The videos went viral, and commenters compared Hof to Chuck Norris, propelling him to a sort of internet alpha-male celebrity. But the condition of the house confirms that web fame does not necessarily translate to riches. The space is a permanent work in progress, with an assortment of bunk beds and yoga mats. A busted sauna sits next door to its new replacement. The coal furnace doesn’t quite work and spews black smoke through cracks in the floorboards. Most of the floors don’t seem level.

The crumbling building is headquarters for Hof’s growing global presence as a New Age guru and ground zero for the experimental training regimens he’s developing. One of Hof’s first students at the house, Justin Rosales, now 25, flew here from Pennsylvania in 2010 to serve as a guinea pig. “If we want to become strong, passionate and motivated, we have to take on seemingly impossible tasks. Without an open mind, the cold will never be your friend,” Rosales tells me over e-mail. He has written a book with Hof about the experience, called Becoming the Iceman, which is often passed among devotees interested in cultivating superpowers.

I stash what little winter gear I’ve brought beneath a bunk on the second floor and look out the window onto a snowy field that serves as the main training site. Andrew Lescelius, the wiry asthmatic Nebraskan who arrived a week earlier, crosses the field outside clad only in black underwear, stopping to pick up handfuls of snow and rub them over his arms and chest. Steam erupts off his body in great clouds.

Kuze chooses a bunk next to mine and looks eager to get out into the snow. I let him go on his own. I will have plenty of opportunities to be cold when training begins tomorrow.

After a restless night we meet Hof in the yoga studio. He explains that every training program he runs is different, and the method varies depending on the constitution of the group. But no matter how it starts, the building blocks are simple and, he assures us, our progress will be rapid. “This week we will win the war on bacteria!” he proclaims before warning us he will challenge everything we think about the limits of our body.

At one point Hof tells us to shed our clothing and head outside. We round the farmhouse to a small snowy field frequented by deer and the curious gazes of inquisitive neighbors. As we file past, one of them yells something to us in Polish and Hof chuckles. Most people here think he’s crazy, if affable.

It’s the first time in my life I’ve put my feet directly onto snow, and they feel as sensitive as a newly broken tooth. My heart rate jumps. Kuze lets out a gasp and Hof beams a trickster smile. We stand in a circle and take low horse stances.

We try to focus on our foreheads and simply endure the cold, our chests bare to the air. Five minutes is excruciating, but Hof has us stand for six before sending us numbly into the sauna.

But with numb limbs, going from ice to a 100-plus-degree room is a mistake. The body’s natural reaction to cold is self-preservation. To keep the core warm, the muscles that control arteries clench tightly and restrict the flow of blood only to vital areas in a process known as vasoconstriction. This is why frostbite starts in the extremities. The sudden change to heat has the opposite effect. Veins suddenly pop open and send warm blood rushing through cold areas. The pain is even worse than when we were standing in the snow, something I didn’t think possible.

Kuze stretches his feet toward a box of coals and says he may cry. Lescelius clenches his teeth and holds his breath. A side effect of asthma, he tells me, is poor circulation, and the sensation of vasoconstriction is even more painful. “But I like to think of it as lifting weights for the circulatory system,” he says. Hof nods at the statement. After years of exposing himself to the cold, he can consciously restrict the flow of blood in his body and effectively send it to any part he wants.

Although the first day of exercises is painful and exhausting, true to Hof’s word our progress is rapid. The next day we stand in the snow for 15 minutes before the same feeling of panic sets in. In the afternoon we take a brief dip in the basin of an ice-cold waterfall. It is an experience not unlike walking across a bed of hot coals—a trial by fire but with ice. With every attempt, the barriers we’ve built in our heads about the cold seem to recede.

By the fourth day, standing in the snow is barely a challenge. An hour passes by quicker than five minutes had just days earlier. In the evening we sit on snow-covered rocks by a stream until they’re warm, Hof smiling over us.

•

What we know about how the human body reacts to cold comes mostly from gruesomely accurate studies that emerged from the Dachau death camp. Nazis tracked Jewish prisoners’ core temperatures as they died in ice water. As terrible as they are, these morally compromised studies helped doctors understand how quickly the body loses heat in such conditions. Sitting in 32-degree water, humans begin to feel sluggish after only a minute or two. By 15 minutes most people fall unconscious. They die between 15 and 45 minutes. When the core body temperature falls below 82 degrees, death is almost inevitable. Measured against that data set, Hof seems to perform miracles.

In 2007 at the Feinstein Institute on Long Island, Kenneth Kamler, a world-renowned expedition doctor who has worked on Everest, observed an experiment in which Hof was connected to heart and blood monitors and immersed in ice. At first the experiment hit a major snag. The standard hospital devices that track respiration declared him dead after he’d been in the ice only two minutes. The machine got confused because he didn’t take a breath for more than two minutes and his resting heart rate was a mere 35 beats per minute. He wasn’t dead, though, and Kamler had to disconnect the device to continue. Hof stayed in the ice for 72 minutes. The results were astounding. Hof’s core temperature initially declined a few degrees but then rose again. It was the first scientific validation of Hof’s method. It was becoming clear that Hof could consciously affect his autonomic nervous system to increase his core temperature. “Exactly how you explain it depends on the kind of philosophy you want to believe in,” says Kamler, who references similar feats called tummo performed by Tibetan monks. Ultimately, he says, it boils down to how Hof uses his brain. “The brain uses a lot of energy on higher functions that are not essential to survival. By focusing his mind he can channel that energy to generate body heat,” he speculates.

Interest among scientists snowballed in 2008 just as it had in the mass media more than a decade earlier. At Maastricht University researchers wondered if Hof’s abilities stemmed from a high concentration of mitochondria-rich brown adipose tissue, also known as brown fat. This little-understood tissue can rapidly heat the body when metabolized; it is what allows infants not to succumb to cold in their earliest moments. Usually brown fat mostly disappears by early childhood, but evolutionary biologists believe that early humans may have carried higher concentrations of it to resist extreme environments. The scientists learned that Hof, now 55, had extremely high concentrations—enough to produce five times more energy than the typical 20-year-old—most likely because he repeatedly exposed himself to cold.

Brown fat may be the missing organic structure that separates humans from the natural world. White fat stores caloric energy from food, which the body tends to burn only as a last resort. In fact, it’s difficult to burn the spare tire off your waistline because the body is programmed to store energy: It will burn muscle before it uses white fat to create heat or energy. Brown fat is different. Most people create it automatically when they’re in cold environments—the body detects physical extremes and starts to store mitochondria. The way Hof describes it, when brown fat is activated, the mitochondria enter the bloodstream and metabolize white fat directly to generate heat. Because most people do everything they can to avoid environmental extremes, they never build up brown fat at all. If we lived without clothing, the way our distant ancestors must have, we would have relied on the internal properties of brown fat to keep us alive.

As we sit in the sauna, I ask Hof how someone activates brown fat consciously. Instead of explaining, he tries to demonstrate. He clenches the muscles in his body in sequence, from his rectum to his shoulders, as if pushing something up from below. Then he furrows his brow and squinches down his neck as though trapping that energy in a point that he says is behind his ear. The process turns his skin bright red as if he were catching fire. Suddenly he kicks out his leg, falls against the wall and gasps. “Oh my God,” he says, dazed. In his eagerness to teach, he didn’t calculate the heat of the sauna. He almost blew a fuse. He lurches out of the sauna and rolls in the snow outside. He returns with an embarrassed smirk. “That’s how you do it. But try it only in the cold.”

•

Hans Spaan, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2004, credits Hof with saving his life. “With this disease,” he says, “most people have to take more and more drugs just to maintain the same level of mobility and quality of life, and eventually you max out and begin the long decline.” Spaan is trying to manage his drug regime by accompanying it with the breathing technique and ice-cold showers. He tracks his drug use on spreadsheets and claims to be on far fewer drugs now than when he was first diagnosed. He credits Hof with keeping him out of a wheelchair. Although the anecdotal evidence is encouraging, it’s hard to determine how much of Hof’s abilities can be chalked up to the placebo effect. Since Hof claims to be able to control his autonomic nervous system—the system affected by Parkinson’s—it is important to have scientific backing.

Peter Pickkers is just about the last scientist who would be swayed by outlandish claims. An expert on sepsis and infection at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, he specializes in studies that look at responses of the immune system in humans. In 2010 Hof contacted Pickkers, saying he could suppress or ramp up his immune system at will. The feat is, by definition, almost impossible. But Pickkers, who had watched Hof’s career rise on TV, was curious.

Pickkers devised a test in which he administered endotoxin, a component of E. coli bacteria the body thinks is dangerous but is actually inert. A previous trial Pickkers pioneered proved that 99 percent of healthy people who come in contact with endotoxin react as though they have the flu before the body realizes it has been duped and goes back to normal.

While Hof meditated, Pickkers injected him with the endotoxin. The results were unheard of. “Wim had done things that, if you had asked me prior to the experiment, I would not have thought possible,” Pickkers told me. Whereas almost every other person dosed with endotoxin experienced severe side effects, Hof had nothing more than a minor headache. Blood tests showed he had much higher levels of cortisol—a hormone usually released only during times of extreme stress, sort of like adrenaline—than had been previously recorded. Also, blood drawn while he was meditating remained resistant to endotoxin for six days after it had left his body.

Hof is unambiguous about what he thinks of the results: “If I can show that I can consciously affect my immune system, we will have to rewrite all the medical books.” But Pickkers and much of the rest of the scientific community are more reserved. While the results show an unprecedented response to endotoxin, there is no proof that Hof is anything more than a genetic anomaly. However, the results were promising enough for Pickkers and his colleague Matthijs Kox to commission a second study, this time with Hof guiding a group of college students through the same basic course I took to learn his technique before being injected with endotoxin. If his technique proves to be teachable, then the ground may begin to shift under Pickkers’s feet.

In April 2013, just after I was there, 12 students flew to Poland. Pickkers and Kox remained tight-lipped about the results while the journal article wended its way though the peer-review process, but they’ve issued a press release saying “the trained men produced fewer inflammatory proteins and suffered far less from flu-like symptoms.” Hof is ebullient. In several conversations he tells me that his students were able to master convulsions and fever responses within 15 minutes. Whether he is exaggerating or not remains to be seen, but if the results mirror the 2010 study Pickkers published, Hof will be a certified medical marvel.

•

All I can definitively report is my experience in Poland. I still have my challenge to complete: Despite my progress, I’m not sure I am up for the grueling bare-chested hike straight up a mountain. Sneˇzˇka Mountain straddles the Polish-Czech border and is battered by icy winds throughout the winter months. At its 5,260-foot summit, frequented mostly by intrepid cross-country skiers who hike up from a ski lift, a lonely observatory records the movements of the stars. Starting at the base of the mountain, Hof, myself and three other disciples begin the arduous climb through two feet of fresh powder. Seconds after we pile out of Hof’s dilapidated Volkswagen van, the cold slices through our winter coats like a knife. At 25 degrees Fahrenheit even modest breezes feel excruciating. In the parking lot, skiers clad head to toe in colorful Gore-Tex ensembles wrestle with their gear and trek slowly to the chairlifts.

Hof leads us to a side trail that snakes through parkland to the summit. Ten minutes up the trail, after our bodies have had time to build some internal heat, we start stripping off layers. Ashley Johnson, a former English hooligan who has found new direction in life doing work around Hof’s house in exchange for lessons, slaps Lescelius and Kuze on the back in camaraderie. Bare to the cold, we stash our clothes in a backpack and crunch forward through powder.

The moment I take off my shirt it begins to make some sense how our primordial ancestors survived. Trudging forward I don’t feel the bite of the cold the way I used to. Whatever heat I build up through exertion seems to stay in my skin as if I were wearing a wet suit. I can feel the sting of cold on my skin, but I focus on the point behind my ears that Hof said would help activate my brown fat and send waves of heat through my body.

Then I try to imitate what I witnessed Hof do in the sauna. With my muscles clenched, mind focused, it isn’t long before I am sweating. A thin steamy mist wafts upward from our group. A skier stops to take pictures. A ski patrolman on a snowmobile stops to see if we are okay. A snowboarder lets out a shocked cry and speeds by. Together we plod forward to the summit.

There is a parallel to walking across a bed of hot coals. The temperature is subservient to the task ahead. Six hours later I am nearing the summit, bare-chested and with my legs caked in snow. I have gone from California palm trees to Poland’s snowy peaks in seven days and feel perfectly warm—hot, even.

The trek takes more than seven hours, and every step upward leaves us more exposed than before. The outside temperature drops to eight degrees. About 300 feet shy of the summit, something changes. My core temperature is fine, but the wind has intensified and the incline has gotten steeper. Every step feels harder than the one before, and I am beginning to tire. We are seven hours into the ascent, and I have given my backpack to the younger, fitter Johnson. I worry what would happen to me if I stopped. Would the cold break through the mental barrier I’ve erected and send me cascading into hypothermia? Fear, more than anything else, keeps me walking. Twenty minutes later I reach the summit. I’m not cold but more tired than I can ever remember being before. After taking a couple of photos we walk into the observatory to warm up.

Just like entering the sauna after standing on ice, the warm air hits me and I feel cold. I shed my mental armor and feel ice leak into my bloodstream. I begin to rely on my environment rather than my mind to keep me warm. I shiver, and then I begin to shake. My teeth clatter. I have never been this cold before. It is an hour until I feel ready to get back on my feet for the climb down the mountain. This time, though, I wear a black peacoat that I brought up in a backpack.

Hof plans to attempt to summit Mount Everest soon. It will be his second time after an earlier, aborted, nearly naked attempt. I ask Hof what he thinks would happen if he finally meets his limits on this climb and joins the hundreds who have died on the mountain. Would his message be lost to time? Would even the modest lessons he has been able to give to his flock mean anything if he dies in a way most people would deem foolish? His face grows dark at the thought. He tells me he might cry. “I must not die,” he says. “I’ve decided.”

This article first appeared in Playboy.

Want to read more? Check out the book What Doesn’t Kill Us. Available everywhere.

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Cutthroat Capitalism

(originally published in Wired)

see the full data-driven story by clicking the link above. This isn’t a story that can be told in words. It has to be seen.

The rough  f i s h e r m e n of the so-called somali coast guard are unrepentant criminals, yes, but they’re more than that. they’re innovators. Where earlier sea bandits were satisfied to make off with a dinghy full of booty, pirates who prowl northeast Africa’s gulf of Aden hold captured ships for ransom. this strategy has been fabulously successful: the typical payoff today is 100 times what it was in 2005, and the number of attacks has skyrocketed. ¶ Like any business, somali piracy can be explained in purely economic terms. it flourishes by exploiting the incentives that drive international maritime trade. the other parties involved—shippers, insurers, private security contractors, and numerous national navies—stand to gain more (or at least lose less) by tolerating it than by putting up a serious fight. As for the pirates, their escalating demands are a method of price discovery, a way of gauging how much the market will bear. ¶ the risk-and-reward calculations for the various players arise at key points of tension: at the outset of a shipment, when a vessel comes under attack, during ransom negotiations, and when a deal is struck. As long as national navies don’t roll in with guns blazing, the region’s peculiar economics ensure that most everyone gets a cut. ¶ All of which makes daring rescues, like the liberation in April of the Maersk Alabama’s captain, the exception rather than the rule. such derring-do may become more frequent as public pressure builds to deep-six the brigands. however, the story of the Stolt Valor, captured on september 15, 2008, is more typical. here’s how it played out, along with the cold, hard numbers that have put the somali pirate business model at the center of a growth industry.

Once you’re done reading the story check out the video game that Wired produced to go along with it.

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