How RFK Jr. Hiring a Bird Smuggler Threw His Environmental Group Into Turmoil
We have not heard too much of late about independent candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. though he continues to be a possible wildcard in the presidential race.
Washington Post returns to an old story whose core dispute was covered in the news at the time it happened (c. 2000).
Kennedy in the early 1980s was a young man arrested for heroin possession:
In 1984, a judge sentenced Kennedy to two years’ probation. Abandoning his former career path as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, he entered rehab and eventually began working on a former estate in the Hudson Valley to fulfill his community service requirement. There he encountered the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association, later renamed Riverkeeper, which was setting up its office in a farmhouse on the grounds.
Robert Boyle founded this group in 1966 to address pollution in the Hudson River. When Kennedy resigned around thirty years later, he said that he "co-founded" the group and it had "a budget of zero." The article challenges this account, noting:
By the time Kennedy arrived, the fishermen [working for the group] had notched impressive legal victories against corporations including Exxon and Con Edison and used settlement money to build a private patrol boat, Riverkeeper, in which Cronin cruised the Hudson seeking environmental scofflaws.
Kennedy's involvement in the group helped bring donations. It also helped him build a new career as an environmental activist. Others question the knowledge and ethics of the group under his watch. The article also points to a growing belief he was seen as a prima donna and a bit of an asshole. One example comes from the son who later broke with Kennedy so perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt.
The founder of the group along with some others on the board resigned after a dispute when Kennedy hired a former friend (or however he wanted to label the relationship):
Wegner, then 49, had been released from federal prison just a few months earlier, after serving about 3½ years of a five-year sentence for tax fraud, perjury and conspiracy to violate wildlife protection laws. The charges all sprang from his roughly decade-long run as the alleged kingpin of a smuggling ring that trafficked in Australian cockatoos.
An environmental criminal does sound like a bad look. The article also rejects Kennedy's spin that animals smuggled were unwanted "vermin" (really?) species. It does cite someone who liked both sides of the dispute noting that Wegner's actual service in the organization turned out to be fine.
(It's hard to think there was nothing bad you can say about it so I am left with a belief that not everything about that was covered.)
Shortly after the split in Riverkeeper, Kennedy moved on to his current most controversial position (other than Trump enabling):
Two years after the Riverkeeper split, Boyle left the Hudson Valley, moving upstate to Cooperstown. He was there in 2005 when Kennedy published an article falsely asserting that vaccines caused autism — after multiple corrections, it was eventually retracted by Rolling Stone and Salon — and in the ensuing years as Kennedy doubled down on the article’s debunked premise.
The article's overall premise is that various troubling aspects of Kennedy's personality are reflected in his relationship with this group. This includes personal aggrandizement, bad relationships with others, an iffy relationship with facts, and a questionable activist reputation.
He had an environmentalism-related show on the old Air America. The idea is that he was okay until his anti-vax activism in recent years. First off, that has been going on for around twenty years. Second, there are some red flags besides that.
The article is a good piece of investigative journalism.
RIP Flaco: On a somewhat related subject, Flaco, the famous owl, died recently.
He was 14 but only free from captivity for a little over a year. He died after hitting a building, with glass windows a menace for birds. Christian Cooper in his autobiography noted how ornithologists helped address a problem birds had with lights during ceremonial remembrances of 9/11.
Tests are being done to determine if he was weakened by eating poisoned rats or something. His death does underline why people worried about him flying around the city though confining an owl in a city enclosure isn't great either.