HOT MUCK-RAKER: AL GIORDANO

In 1978, Al Giordano, now forty-one, was arrested for criminal trespass
while protesting a nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. He was sentenced
to 100 days in jail but succeeded in causing enough trouble to get kicked
out after twenty. Since then, he's been causing various kinds of trouble as
a political organizer and a reporter and, in general, continues to afflict
the comfortable. Now he's being sued by a multibillion-dollar opponent who
isn't having a whole hell of a lot more luck with him than the New
Hampshire jailers.

The deal with the current litigation is this: In 1997 Giordano had gone to
Chiapas, Mexico, to hang with the Zapatista rebels. He was then
thirty-seven and had been, until the previous year, the political reporter
at the Boston Phoenix. "I wanted out of journalism," he says. "II had been
covering politics, but nothing was happening in politics." He began to read
Spanish language newspapers. "And I found that even though Mexican
journalists are subject to much more repression and danger than journalists
in the United States, they're far more courageous in reporting on difficult
subjects like the Drug War."

Consequently, in the spring of 2000, Giordano launched narconews.com, a
nonprofit pro-legalization site that presents Giordano's reporting on the
Drug War as well as the best of the Latin American reporting in
translation. ("Pro-legalization is just the train; Giordano says. "The
destination is much more sweeping authentic democracy, peace with justice,
human rights.") The lawsuit, which was filed in New York State Supreme
Court last August by the National Bank of Mexico - Banamex - alleges libel,
slander and interference with prospective economic advantage. The alleged
defamatory statements involve reports that major narcotics trafficking was
occurring on property owned by Roberto Hernandez, the bank's owner and
president.

It is probably safe to say that this suit is not about money. Since filing
the suit, Banamex was sold to Citigroup for $12.5 billion and Hernandez,
who ranks 387th on Forbes magazine's list of the wealthiest people on
earth, is worth about $1.3 billion. Conversely, Giordano's most valuable
possessions are a $1,200 laptop and a guitar. It is also probably safe to
say that in filing this suit, Banamex didn't know with whom it was picking
a fight. If you took it in a straight line from the dissatisfaction with
the world he began to express as a student at Mamaroneck High School in
suburban Westchester County, New York, to the present, the Bronx-born
Giordano's biography would go like this: In 1976, when he was sixteen, he
went to Albany and testified before a legislative commission in the state
Senate against nuclear power, felt completely ignored and concluded that
the tactic of lobbying the government was futile. He was arrested for what
would be the first of twenty-seven times on May 1st, 1977. When he was
twenty and living in a cabin in Rowe, Massachusetts, running the Rowe
Nuclear Conversion Campaign, which ended in the first-ever shutdown of an
operating nuclear power plant in America, he met Abbie Hoffman, who called
him "the best political organizer of his generation." The two worked
together until Hoffman's death in 1989, opposing us. intervention in
Nicaragua and fighting to save the Delaware and St. Lawrence rivers. He
also occasionally worked on political campaigns, notably for Sen. John Kerry.

Around 1988, after winning more than twenty referendums and political
campaigns in a row, it occurred to Giordano that he could also effect
social change through journalism. For the next eight years, he worked as a
political reporter, ending up at the Phoenix, where he still occasionally
publishes. Unhappy with what he saw as the decline of journalism in the
U.S., he wrote an essay to that effect called "The Medium Is the Middleman;
which his friend the late Jeff Buckley adapted into a song called"The Sky
Is a landfill"(it appears on Buckley's posthumous 1998 album, Sketches for
My Sweetheart, the Drunk). Shortly after that, Giordano moved to Mexico.

Obviously, given the sale to Citigroup, Banamex can afford to continue
filing suits against Giordano in as many cities, countries or universes as
they can find a pretext for, effectively turning Giordano into a full-time
international defendant. "This is a harassment suit," says Giordano, who is
currently $200,000 in debt from his legal battles. "Narconews is the canary
in the coal mine, and if that bird stops singing, then all the miners of
authentic journalism will have to evacuate the mine."