ON 15TH ANNIV OF LADY GAGA'S 'PAPARAZZI,' I HUNTED CLARENCE THOMAS AT BILLIONAIRE HARLAN CROW'S ADIRONDACK MOUNTAIN HIDEOUT AND THIS IS WHAT I FOUND
A PRIMITIVE TEMPLE PERFECT FOR CEREMONIES, RITES-OF-PASSAGE AND EVEN VIRGIN SACRIFICE IS ONE OF THE MANY STRIKING FEATURES OF TOPRIDGE
July 17, 2024
What really captured my imagination wasn't the giant statue of Poseidon rising beside the small beach in front of me—in front of a luxury lakefront log mansion deep in upstate New York's Adirondack mountain wilderness. Neither was it the sprawling, rustic estate's luxury treehouse. Nor was it even the exact replica of Hagrid's hut from Lord of the Rings.
Instead it was the outdoor pavilion constructed of giant, hand-hewn stones with a moss-covered roof topped with a dragon. The space was filled with handmade wooden chairs covered in animal furs. Rustic artworks including a stone ram’s head, pig head, an Indian hatchet and scrolls depicting primitive Viking long boats hung from the walls. A small, discreet ledge circled the ceiling and held evenly-spaced white candles.
The place seemed perfect for ceremonies, rites-of-passage and even—a horror-movie fan might crack wise—virgin sacrifice.
The man who owns it, billionaire Texas real estate developer Harlan Crow, calls it "The Forge."
The Forge at Topridge. Photo creditL JB Nicholas.
Lady Gaga released her hit single "Paparazzi" July 7, 2009. To celebrate its 15th anniversary, I went real-life paparazzi-hunting for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after I got tipped he was hanging out at Crow's hideout.
Thomas isn't exactly George Clooney but he was in the news. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) filed a petition to impeach the Supreme Court's longest-serving justice July 10. AOC's Articles of Impeachment allege Thomas did not report various "gifts" from Crow. Thomas admitted Crow is one of his "dearest friends" in a 2023 news release.
Among the gifts not reported, AOC alleges, are "extensive free lodging and food at Topridge, a resort in the Adirondacks owned by a company owned or controlled by Mr. Crow."
Another gift allegedly not reported by Thomas, "multiple trips via non-commercial transportation on a private airplane on multiple occasions" to various places, including "to Topridge Resort in New York in 2022.”
I'd mastered hunting celebrities on the streets of New York City, but Topridge is a classic Adirondack "Great Camp" situated on an esker between two lakes in the forest. In addition to its main lodge, there’s a number of guest houses, four boathouses and dozens of other out buildings—including that stone outdoor pavilion that captured my imagination.
It has an access road, but it's gated and private. Since there's public access to the lake, I decided to use a canoe to get close.
Maybe I'd get lucky. Maybe I'd catch Thomas barbequeing for a band of bagpipers like he did in 2008. More likely if I was lucky at all it would be catching him taking a swim. Or maybe I'd get him sitting in a circle with Crow and their Conservative homeboys as the sun set, smoking cigars, shooting the breeze and singing campfire songs.
If not, no biggie. I'd spend a day paddling around a wild lake, hanging out with the loons.
Map of Upper St. Regis Lake, New York State Dep’t of Environmental Conservation.
Gaga and I have a colorful history, even though she's only vaguely aware of it.
Originally from the Bronx, I lived in New York City and worked as a paralegal, news photographer, paparazzo and reporter before moving to the Adirondack mountains in upstate New York in 2022. When Gaga first burst on the scene in 2009, photographers like me chased her all over the City with cars and on bicycles.
Those chases were wild. The biggest ones involved half-a-dozen or more cars and another half-dozen bicycle-riding paparazzi. During one, I hopped off my bike, locked it to a pole and jumped into a woman's classic 1980s-era Trans Am when Gaga was about to disappear into the Holland Tunnel. I asked the shocked stranger if she wanted to chase Gaga with me to a New Jersey airport and she gamely said yes.
The last time I photographed Gaga was at the Roseland Ballroom in 2014. The storied venue was closing and Gaga was playing its last shows. My grandmother and grandfather met on its dancefloor during World War II.
Gaga was very hard to get candid—as an ordinary person, not in one of the zany costumes she always wore in public back then. Her people were professionals and they knew how to hide her. One of the few times I got her truly candid she sat in the front seat of her black SUV, powered down the window, leaned back, stuck her black stiletto-heeled ankle boots out the window, crossed her legs and toked on a joint as she rode through midtown Manhattan's canyons in her fuel-injected steel chariot.
Lady Gaga arriving at the Roseland Ballroom, Mar. 28, 2014. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Cherished memories like this from my wild paparazzi life sometimes make me smile randomly while I'm living my new, and much-quieter, life along the Canadian frontier.
So when I got tipped Thomas was at Topridge and realized it was the 15th anniversary of "Paparazzi" I had to take a shot at photographing him there. Not only was it a warm, sentimental stroll down memory lane, I needed the money. Given the intense interest in Thomas these days, a photograph like that would be worth a lot of it. Maybe enough money to buy the guideboat and pick-up I needed to work full-time as a fishing guide.
From my perspective, it was like someone telling me a bag of cash was just sitting in the forest: I had to go get it!
It also didn't hurt Topridge is only a half-hour drive from my adopted home.
There was only one problem.
I intended to leave my old life totally behind when I left the City. Like Cortés, I even burned my ships: giving away my high-powered, long-range paparazzi lenses and cameras.
Yet, by one of those near-mystical twists of fate that sometimes bless bold adventurers with unexpected gifts, my new partner just happened to have one I could borrow. It had belonged to her ex-husband. He used it to photograph Adirondack wildlife, including moose. He died unexpectedly two years before.
From all I heard tell about him, he'd be glad I put his camera to good use.
Self-portrait. The author fly-fishing for trout on the East Branch of the Ausable River, July 14, 2021. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
When I put my canoe into Upper St. Regis lake deja vu hit me.
The place hadn't changed hardly at all since I first paddled its waters as a Boy Scout in the early 1980s. The seasonal post office was exactly the same—except the free phone didn't work anymore and the porch was piled with FedEx and Amazon packages. The Independence Day decorations looked the same too. The timelessness of the place felt reassuring, even right.
Thomas worked in Pres. Ronald Regan's Department of Education, DOE, before being appointed by the president chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, EEOC, in 1982. Pres. George H.W. Bush put him on the D.C. Court of Appeals in 1990. A year later, when the court's first Black justice retired, Bush nominated Thomas for Thurgood Marshall's seat on the Supreme Court.
Before Thomas's Senate Confirmation hearing, Anita Hill alleged Thomas sexually harassed her while both worked for DOE. She claimed he asked her out, demanded an explanation when she declined, casually spoke of porn he'd watched and related sexual escapades he'd had. She told him talking about sex made her uneasy and asked him to stop, but he persisted, she said.
Still, when Thomas asked Hill if she wanted to come with him from DOE to EEOC she said yes.
Three women who worked with Thomas and Hill at DOE, Linda M. Jackson, Janet H. Brown and Lori Saxon, said Thomas never harassed them and Hill never said anything about Thomas harassing her. Hill left the EEOC for a job as a law professor in 1983. Thomas gave her a reference. They stayed in touch.
Thomas confronted the senators and the cameras point-blank.
Virginia, his wife since 1987, sat behind him. Thomas denied harassing Hill. Her allegations, he snarled, were "sleaze." The so-called hearing was a "circus" and "national disgrace."
"From my standpoint, as a Black American," Thomas continued, "it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in anyway dein to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas"—a reference to his Conservative philosophy.
Thomas didn't stop there. He was just warming up.
Pointedly, Thomas charged the Senate Judiciary Committee—led by then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.)—with sending the investigators who searched for "this dirt" which they "leaked to the media."
"This committee,” Thomas roared, “validated it and displayed it in prime time."
In Thomas's view, the Committee of 14 white men singled him out because he was Black. They never put a white judge through what they put him through.
The Washington, D.C. press corp agreed.
"Nothing like what happened today has ever happened before," Jim Lehrer reported that evening for PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.
Thomas was confirmed 52–48 on Oct. 15, 1991.
Later, America learned Thomas was a Black Nationalist in college who kept a poster of Malcolm X on his wall. He had something of an epiphany in 1970 that led him to go to law school. His first big job in Washington, D.C. was working for the DOE, where he met Hill.
After Pres. Ronald Regan appointed Thomas to chair the EEOC, the federal agency responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws, including affirmative action, Thomas bought an IROC-Z camaro and kept both an American flag and a Gadsden "Don't Tread on Me" flag on the wall of his EEOC office.
By outward appearances, Thomas was successful.
But inside Thomas was torn because he thought the only reason Regan made him EEOC chair was because he was Black, which angered him. That's what Lillian McEwen, who met Thomas in 1979 and dated him from 1981 to 1986, said. When they first met, Thomas was depressed. He drank heavily, which he admits. McEwen helped clean him up. With her, he kept his bedroom and his body immaculate. He kept all his hair closely cropped, she said.
In her memoir, D.C. Unmasked & Undressed, McEwen reveals four threesomes she had with Thomas and other women. She says she was a swinger before they met, loved sex of all kinds without shame, never said no to any sexual request he made and brought him to Plato's Retreat, a sex club in New York City, where he signed in using his real name. She calls him a "national treasure."
They broke up because when Thomas stopped drinking he became another man who was more ambitious than sexual.
Some might interpret McEwen's revelations to support Hill's allegations. McEwen said Hill is "a woman scorned. She didn't tell the truth and he didn't either."
I was in a New York state prison during Thomas's confirmation hearing, so I missed all the fun. Sentenced to 6 1/3-to-19 years for shooting a man who tried to rob me a year before, I had my own problems. To fix them, I took college classes and studied law in the prison's law library.
It was the judge Thomas replaced, Marshall, who wrote the 1977 Supreme Court decision requiring prisons to provide free lawyers or law libraries to prisoners, Bounds v. Smith. New York chose law libraries. I became a jailhouse lawyer, studying the law and using it to get people out of jail and defend their civil rights.
The first time I remember reading about Thomas was in a newspaper report describing his dissent in a case interpreting the Eighth Amendment—which prohibits cruel and unusual punishments. The case was 1992's Hudson v. McMillian, where a majority of justice decided prison guards violated the amendment when they beat Hudson even though he was handcuffed and shackled. The guards cracked Hudson's dental plate, loosened his teeth and bruised his face.
Thomas joined Justice Antonin Scalia to complain the majority made a mistake. Thomas and Scalia argued the Eighth Amendment only prohibits torture. Hudson's injuries were "minor" and therefore not torture. In effect, the majority added a new rule to the amendment prohibiting excessive force.
In response, the New York Times called Thomas the "cruelest justice" in an op-ed.
Crow bought Topridge, from a bankrupt Atlantic City hot dog kingpin, in 1994. Thomas and Crow met in 1996. Thomas has spent time at Topridge for 20 years, ProPublica reported in 2023.
Critics of the Supreme Court's Conservative decisions have called for a Code of Conduct including additional rules requiring the justices and their wives to disclose all the gifts they receive, whatever the form or source.
These calls culminated in AOC's impeachment petition against Thomas for allegedly failing to report Crow's gifts.
Crow's lawyers say they do "not believe the Committee has the authority to investigate Mr. Crow's personal friendship with Justice Clarence Thomas."
US Post Office, Upper St. Regis Lake, July 4, 2024. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.
Topridge is on the far side of the lake from its sole public boat launch. It's not the only historic camp on the 742-acre lake. As I paddled across it, history glided by.
Whitelaw Reid, publisher of the New York Tribune, built the first Great Camp on Upper St. Regis lake in 1882. Some of America's most notable families followed. Cereal queen Marjorie Merriweather Post built Topridge in 1923. Other camps were built by the Vanderbilt, Spaulding and Prat families. All still stand. Reid's camp, Wild Air, is still owned by Reid's descendents.
These and newer camps built with stones and logs in the traditional Great Camp-style dot the tree-lined shores, seamlessly blending past and present.
How the new architecture fit with the old made me think of Originalism because Thomas is an Originalist. Originalism is a methodology or set of general rules for deciding what the Constitution means. Originalists examine the text first. After the text, they examine the historical record for evidence of what the text meant to the people who wrote it.
If something is not covered by the Constitution, or if strict application of the Constitution produces an unanticipated or undesirable result, Originalists believe it's up to the People's elected representatives to amend the Constitution, through the process established by the Constitution. It's not up to the justices to change the Constitution by judicial fiat.
Supreme Court justices are appointed for life. Elected representatives serve fixed terms. Originalism encourages Democracy, Originalists say. It forces dialogue and compromise.
Originalism stands in stark contrast to the other primary method for interpreting the Constitution, Pragmatism.
Pragmatist judges view Constitutional interpretation as a creative endeavor. To the Pragmatist, the Constitution is almost a blank slate open to unrestricted, free-wheeling interpretation. It's OK for judges to base decisions on personal beliefs, biases, religious dogma, political pressure from the politicians who appointed them or anything else that tickles their fancy or scares them—so long as they can cloak it with "precedent" (prior court decisions generally considered binding).
It makes sense Thomas likes Topridge: its architecture echoes his Originalist judicial philosophy. Present anchored in the past.
An outdoor fireplace at Topridge, complete with eagle and bronze seal of the United States like that found in federal courthouses. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
I wanted to leave my old life behind and start a new one as a fishing guide but it hasn't worked out that way because I've had to fight for the government-issued licenses I need to work as a guide. My felony conviction is the reason I had to fight, even though it was more than three decades old.
I won that legal fight in federal court in New York and I'm winning it in New Hampshire—thanks to the First Amendment. In these courtroom battles, I've had a powerful ally: Justice Thomas. I'm not suggesting a secret alliance. I'm referring to a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision he wrote, Nat'l Inst. of Family & Life Advocates v. Becerra, or NIFLA.
When I sued New York and New Hampshire, both states' argued something called the "professional speech" doctrine required my First Amendment claims be thrown out of court, without even a trial. But Justice Thomas's opinion for the Court in NIFLA overruled the professional speech doctrine.
The result was two federal judges issuing landmark decisions in my favor finding outdoor guiding to be expressive activity and association protected by the First Amendment.
I tried to get a guide license in my grandmother's home state, Maine, but was denied and my federal lawsuit dismissed. I've applied for permission to appeal—to the Supreme Court.
A Great Camp out-building on Upper St. Regis lake. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Finally I paddled all the way across the lake.
Three of Topridge’s four boathouses faced me, each bigger than the other. The main boathouse is 40-foot tall and has room for three big boats. Altogether the place has dozens of boats of all sizes and shapes. There are metal boats, wood boats, sail boats, JFK-style throwback motorboats, row boats, paddle boards, boogie boards, etc.
After I'd inventoried Crow's navy, I continued paddling along the shore, curious if I'd find any surprises.
I found The Forge: the primitive stone outdoor pavilion topped with a dragon.
I suppose its makers meant it literally but for me, because of the life I've led, it was hard to interpret it literally. The man I am today was forged in the crucible of prison. That's where I corrected myself through study and discipline, like a blacksmith uses a forge to remove impurities from the metal they pound into shape.
Men are not born angels. We don't float on clouds in heaven. We walk the Devilish earth. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone deserves a second chance.
Finding The Forge changed my plans. Sure it was a billionaire's playground, but it was also an artful representation of the power of people to transform. To "forge" themselves into something new and better, as I had done.
Liberals have given Thomas shit for his Conservative ideals for four decades. To try to win an ideological battle, they made him into a cartoon villain. It's doubtful that then-Sen. Biden's Judiciary Committee would have turned Thomas's confirmation into a public inquisition if Thomas was white, or if he wasn't Conservative.
I finally saw that now, floating in the lake in front of The Forge. The guideboat would have to wait.
It was time to find those loons.
Self-portrait with loon. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.