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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan – review

T he title of Jennifer Egan's new novel may make it sound more like an episode of Scooby-Doo than an exceptional rendering of contemporary America, but don't be fooled. The book received rave reviews when it was published in the US last year, and for good reason; it has since been named a finalist for several prestigious American prizes. Egan has said that the novel was inspired by two sources: Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu , and HBO's The Sopranos . That shouldn't make sense but it does: Goon Squad is a book about memory and kinship, time and narrative, continuity and disconnection, in which relationships shift and recombine kaleidoscopically. It is neither a novel nor a collection of short stories, but something in between: a series of chapters featuring interlocking characters at different points in their lives, whose individual voices combine to a create a symphonic work that uses its interconnected form to explore ideas about human interconnectedness. This is a difficult book to summarise, but a delight to read, gradually distilling a medley out of its polyphonic, sometimes deliberately cacophonous voices.

The "goon squad" of the title is not itself a reference to The Sopranos : there are no mobsters here. It is one character's name for time: "Time's a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?" Everyone in the book is pushed around by time, circumstance and, occasionally, the ones they love, as Egan reveals with great elegance and economy the wobbly arcs of her characters' lives, their painful pasts and future disappointments. Characters who are marginal in one chapter become the focus of the next; the narrative alternates not only between first-person and third-person accounts, but – perhaps just because she can – Egan throws in a virtuosic second-person story as well, in which a suicidal young man tells his tale to a colloquial "you". She also shifts dramatically across times and places: punk teenagers in 1970s San Francisco become disillusioned adults in the suburbs of 1990s New York; their children grow up in an imagined, slightly dystopic future in the California desert, or attend a legendary concert at "The Footprint", where the Twin Towers used to be, sometime in the 2020s.

The stories circle magnetically around a few characters who recur a bit more frequently than others, and broadly around the American music scene: Lou, a coke-snorting, teenage-girl-seducing music producer in the 1970s, becomes the mentor of an untalented young bass player, Bennie, who becomes a music producer himself, who hires a young woman, Sasha, who has a problem with kleptomania, who sleeps with a young man, Alex, who much later ends up hired by Bennie to engineer the comeback of Bennie's high-school friend Scott, who went off the rails as an adult and ended up one day in Bennie's office with a fish he'd caught in the East River, where Sasha's best friend and boyfriend in college had once gone for an early morning swim with tragic consequences. Bennie's wife works for a publicist named Dolly whose daughter, Lulu, will end up working with Alex; Bennie's wife's brother is a journalist who is arrested for the attempted rape of an actress named Kitty Jackson who has her own fall from grace and is later hired by Dolly to enable the public rehabilitation of a genocidal Latin American dictator.

Each chapter has its own distinct voice and mood, modulating from satire to farce, from melancholy to tragedy. I've never found a description of attempted rape funny before, but when Jules Jones writes (from prison) his account of his assault on Kitty Jackson during an interview, it becomes an uproarious parody of David Foster Wallace that owes more than a little to Nabokov as well, as Jules describes finding himself with "one hand covering Kitty's mouth and doing its best to anchor her rather spirited head, the other fumbling with my zipper, which I'm having some trouble depressing, possibly because of the writhing motions of my subject beneath me." Kitty sprays him with Mace, stabs him in the leg with a Swiss army knife, and runs away. "I think I'd have to call that the end of our lunch," Jules remarks.

If it comes as a surprise that an attempted rape can be hilarious, it is an even greater surprise that a PowerPoint presentation can be moving. Goon Squad becomes more fragmented, and more formally experimental, as it progresses: the penultimate chapter is written entirely as the PowerPoint slide diary of Sasha's teenage daughter Alison, whose brother is obsessed with pauses in rock songs. Those pauses, like the spaces between PowerPoint slides, become a metaphor for the gaps between what we mean and what we say, or the apparently unbridgeable distance between family members. The trick feels appropriate in a book preoccupied throughout by the effects of technology on our lives and culture, from the consequences for music of the digital revolution (as Bennie observes, digital production has transformed not only the industry of music but its sound as well) to the way in which technology is transforming our language. Egan's Orwellian final chapter imagines a future in which English has decomposed into radical text-speak: "if thr r children, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?"

Egan has said that the organising principle of A Visit from the Goon Squad is discontinuity; this may be true, but the reason the book works so well is because of the continuities she has also created: her atomised people collide, scatter and recombine in patterns that are less chaotic than they appear. Egan's characters, and the America they inhabit, are winding entropically down. It's a kind of meditation on the butterfly effect, in which recurrence becomes the measure of the chaos of our lives, the novel reimagined as a series of chain reactions. But Egan's vision of history and time is also decidedly, and perhaps reassuringly, cyclical: the impacts these characters have upon each other are engineered not by coincidence but by connectedness itself, as the people we bump against and bang into become the story of our lives.

Sarah Churchwell is a senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia

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A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

by Jennifer Egan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 2010

Another ambitious change of pace from talented and visionary Egan, who reinvents the novel for the 21st century while...

“Time’s a goon,” as the action moves from the late 1970s to the early 2020s while the characters wonder what happened to their youthful selves and ideals.

Egan ( The Keep , 2006, etc.) takes the music business as a case in point for society’s monumental shift from the analog to the digital age. Record-company executive Bennie Salazar and his former bandmates from the Flaming Dildos form one locus of action; another is Bennie’s former assistant Sasha, a compulsive thief club-hopping in Manhattan when we meet her as the novel opens, a mother of two living out West in the desert as it closes a decade and a half later with an update on the man she picked up and robbed in the first chapter. It can be alienating when a narrative bounces from character to character, emphasizing interconnections rather than developing a continuous story line, but Egan conveys personality so swiftly and with such empathy that we remain engaged. By the time the novel arrives at the year “202-” in a bold section narrated by Sasha’s 12-year-old daughter Alison, readers are ready to see the poetry and pathos in the small nuggets of information Alison arranges like a PowerPoint presentation. In the closing chapter, Bennie hires young dad Alex to find 50 “parrots” (paid touts masquerading as fans) to create “authentic” word of mouth for a concert. This new kind of viral marketing is aimed at “pointers,” toddlers now able to shop for themselves thanks to “kiddie handsets”; the preference of young adults for texting over talking is another creepily plausible element of Egan’s near-future. Yet she is not a conventional dystopian novelist; distinctions between the virtual and the real may be breaking down in this world, but her characters have recognizable emotions and convictions, which is why their compromises and uncertainties continue to move us.

Pub Date: June 8, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-307-59283-5

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

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BookBrowse Reviews A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

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A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

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A spellbinding interlocking narrative that circles the lives of an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and the troubled young woman he employs

"The days of losing touch are almost gone," proclaims one of the many characters in Jennifer Egan's meditation on the loss of youthful idealism to the ravages of time and the secrets that reverberate through the years. It is the early 1990s, and Sasha, Drew, and Rob are students at New York University, bright 20-somethings on the verge of promising lives, in a city aglow with possibility. Bill Clinton has just been elected, the Internet is beginning to bubble up from its underground status into a mainstream phenomenon, and 9/11 is still a blissful decade away. "We'll meet in that new place," says their friend Bix, the Internet prophet, "and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost." However, the realities of losing touch and getting lost animate this novel, with characters breaking away from each other far more often than coming together. Rock music provides the connecting thread between these characters as well as their only constant glimmer of salvation; almost everyone in Goon Squad either performs in a band, works for a record company, or avidly listens to music, making the novel a rock fan's dream. Rock music is notoriously difficult to write about, especially in fictional form, where literary platitudes and rhapsodic discursions often fall short of the transformative experience of actually listening to the music. Egan succeeds, though, by offering pithy observations on the sterility of digital remastering ("The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization , which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh") and the overwhelming power of listening to music over head phones ("...the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage.."). Music lovers recognize these sorts of truths as gospel, and Egan's obvious affinity with music, especially punk and post-punk, gives the book all the magic of a favorite song. My favorite songs have always been the sad ones, and in this respect, Goon Squad does not disappoint. Chapters 3, 4, and 11 contain some of the most heartbreaking depictions of adolescent turmoil that I have ever read: Chapter 3 focuses on Bennie's youth in the San Francisco punk scene and is narrated by Rhea, the perceptive and lonely girl who loves him; Chapter 4 takes us back to the early '70s, on a life-changing African safari with Lou, his girlfriend, and his daughter and son; and Chapter 11, which could stand alone as a prize-worthy short story, explores the complex relationship between young runaway Sasha and the uncle who searches for her in the underbelly of Naples, circa 1988. When Egan bluntly reveals what will eventually happen to her characters, often in a sentence or two, their often-tragic fates carry devastating impact. Even the stories that end more or less happily have a kind of melancholy, as characters exchange the brash vitality of youth for the quiet resignation of adulthood. While Goon Squad is brilliantly written, it does have a few flaws, the kind of minor irritations that music fans recognize from listening to an otherwise great album marred by the occasional bum note. Aside from the aforementioned Chapter 11, Sasha remains an oddly uninteresting character, one whose alleged allure never seems quite earned, despite such quirks as kleptomania, bright red hair, and an apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. Often the other characters surrounding her seem much more nuanced, which renders the chapters in which she appears akin to watching a movie for the supporting actors instead of the star. Likewise, the Jules and Kitty storyline comes across as a pleasant diversion that adds little to the overall plot; their chapter, written in the form of an entertainment article that might have appeared in the '90s heyday of Rolling Stone or Spin , is a dead ringer for the arch meta-narratives of writers like Nicholson Baker and David Foster Wallace, studded with ironic commentary and self-referential footnotes. Egan can write well in any form she chooses, but this section verges on overkill, as does the Power Point format that Sasha's precocious daughter uses to tell the tale of Sasha's adult life as a mother and sculptor in the California desert. Still, at its best, A Visit from the Goon Squad approaches the mournful majesty of the song lyrics from which Chapter 11's title, "Good-bye, My Love," may be taken: "Good-bye, my love/Maybe for forever/Good-bye, my love/The tide waits for me/Who knows when we shall meet again/If ever…"(" Time" by the Alan Parsons Project , 1981).

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Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Home » All Reviews » Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

“I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away—I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.”

Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad , is (in)famous for its penultimate chapter, which is written as a PowerPoint presentation. While polarizing among reviewers, this is actually my favorite chapter in the book. I find it amazing how Jennifer Egan could capture such a wide range of emotions in a PowerPoint presentation, which centers on the intra-family dynamics of one of the main characters, Sasha.

Sasha’s son, Lincoln, is neurodivergent and obsessed with slight pauses in rock music, such as in “Young Americans” by David Bowie or “Supervixen” by Garbage. Lincoln is unable to articulate his emotions directly, but he does so through his obsession with pauses in his favorite songs. This obsession leads to my favorite quote of the novel, as Lincoln explains why he is so enamored with pauses:

“The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.”

This quote is also a metaphor for the lives of our two main characters, Sasha, and her record company boss, Bennie, who is also a former punk rocker. Rock music lionizes the young, and the relationship of the characters to the music business only exaggerates their inevitable aging. This brings me to my second-favorite quote for the book:

“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.”

A Visit from the Goon Squad is structured as a series of short stories that bounce around in time and perspective, some focusing on Sasha and Bennie and others providing a voice to several different side characters. The stories featuring Sasha and Bennie were by far my favorites. They are both such compelling characters in their good-hearted brokenness.

The opening chapter tells the story of Sasha’s kleptomania, and how she couldn’t stop herself from stealing a wallet from a public restroom while on a date. The second story tells of Bennie’s obsession with consuming gold flakes in his beverages as a very expensive panacea for all his troubles.

The stories that feature the side characters are less compelling; I would have preferred spending more time with Sasha and Bennie. Also, the stories kept shifting among first-, second-, and third-person narration for no apparent reason other than for Jennifer Egan to flex her narrative muscles.

Overall, I really enjoyed A Visit from the Goon Squad but would have preferred a more consistent focus on the main characters.

A Visit from the Goon Squad •

John Mauro lives in a world of glass amongst the hills of central Pennsylvania. When not indulging in his passion for literature or enjoying time with family, John is training the next generation of materials scientists at Penn State University, where he teaches glass science and materials kinetics. John also loves cooking international cuisine and kayaking the beautiful Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.

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A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan

Alfred A. Knopf: 278 pp., $25.95

Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” is a lively novel in stories about Sasha, an assistant in the music business, and her boss, Bennie Salazar. It may be the smartest book you can get your hands on this summer.

We start with Sasha, a wry 35-year-old with sticky fingers. She’s extremely competent at her job, bored, nonplussed by the date who marvels at her old-style bathtub-in-the-kitchen New York apartment. Her only thrill comes from stealing; she doesn’t profit from it, instead keeping her take — a wallet, a child’s scarf, a seashell — as relics. She’s in therapy — she knows she’s in a bad way.

Punker-turned-executive Bennie Salazar is also in trouble. He’s been dumped by his wife, can’t seem to communicate with his son and, worst of all, has fallen out of sync with the music business. To Bennie, today’s music is “[t]oo clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh…. Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.” His failures resound in his head so loudly that he writes down a litany of humiliations, hoping to excise them.

Bennie and Sasha’s intersecting paths are illuminated by the subsequent chapters. But this is an oversimplification. What follows is no set of cause-and-effect flashbacks: Scattered across time, the narrative spins freely apart, like an uncapped centrifuge.

Each chapter is told from a different character’s point of view; Sasha and Bennie are pushed to the margins. Sometimes they’re not even present: One chapter, set in Africa, focuses on the adolescent son of Bennie’s musical mentor Lou, years before Bennie was in the picture. Another follows a disgraced publicist who used to employ Bennie’s ex-wife, while a third is narrated by a college friend of Sasha’s. Sound tangential? Sure, but the strategy succeeds, because these characters move so fully into center stage. Given voice, they become the main players.

These stories, even as they bend away from Sasha and Bennie, draw us in. Two teen girls’ lives are irrevocably changed by the charismatic Lou, with his red convertible and purple crushed velvet bedspread. A bitter celebrity journalist writes an article — with exacting footnotes — describing his ill-fated interview with a dewy starlet. A now-obese singer, once as lithe and explosive as Iggy Pop, tries to convince his publicity team that an aggressive tour — which will probably kill him — is his only choice. An adolescent girl, a decade or more hence, does her homework in Powerpoint; the tensions between her father and brother wrench, even in a chapter written entirely in slide form.

Egan has created, instead of an arc, a narrative constellation, one in which Sasha and Bennie have weak gravitational pull. Lou, Rob, Jules, Rolph, Dolly and others each take their star turns.

Scattered across time, free of chronology, the stories in the book nevertheless have a careful and deliberate structure. The novel is divided into two parts, A and B, much like the title of the singer’s new album, “A to B.” “That’s the question I want to hit straight on,” he says. “How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat [jerk] no one cares about?” The answer isn’t about a sequence of events as much as the cycle of fame into whose orbit he’s swung. There are other orbits: individual tragedies and their passing, barely remembered encounters and their unexpected importance.

Yet in these cycles, the characters assert themselves. Over and over, they turn toward the sun, as if to stop time. A woman remembers when she betrayed Lou by sitting with another man on top of a pool house at sunrise. Parents, striving for balance, watch their toddler stagger along a wall of people gathered to watch the sunset. A teenaged Sasha, all but lost in a rambling Italian boarding house, counts among her meager belongings a wire she’s looped across her window; when the setting sun passes through its circle, it brings an unwanted visitor a moment of surprise and delight. “See,” she mutters to him, “it’s mine.”

Sasha’s inclination to possess things that don’t belong to her is not so unlike a novelist who, in rewriting another’s story, can give it a new tenor, push it into a new curve on the cycle. In the novel, Sasha grabs Bennie’s list of private humiliations, reading aloud, to his agony. “‘Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.’ … ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘They’re titles, right?’” Once he hears his fears recast as mundane song titles, Bennie feels a sudden peace; his darkness is made light.

Kellogg is lead blogger for Jacket Copy, The Times’ book blog.

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Carolyn Kellogg is a prize-winning writer who served as Books editor of the Los Angeles Times for three years. She joined the L.A. Times in 2010 as staff writer in Books and left in 2018. In 2019, she was a judge of the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Prior to coming to The Times, Kellogg was editor of LAist.com and the web editor of the public radio show Marketplace. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English from the University of Southern California.

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Jennifer Egan and the Goon Squad

The novelist talks about her pulitzer-winning book, which includes one chapter written as a powerpoint presentation, and stephen fry discusses greek mythology..

Hosted by Sam Tanenhaus and Pamela Paul

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For the next few months, we’re sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast’s archives. This week’s segments first appeared in 2010 and 2020, respectively.

Jennifer Egan’s latest novel, “The Candy House,” is a follow-up to her Pulitzer-winning novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which came out in 2010. That year she appeared on the podcast and told the host Sam Tanenhaus how she had gone about organizing the book’s centrifugal structure: “What I was really interested in was trying to move through time and work with the difference between private and public. We see people and they seem to be easily categorizable — sometimes they seem like types. And I loved then taking that person that we had seen peripherally and showing us that person’s inner life in a really immediate way,” she says. “It happened very organically. … I just followed the trail of my own curiosity.”

Also this week, we revisit the actor and writer Stephen Fry’s 2020 conversation with the host Pamela Paul, in which he discussed topics including Oscar Wilde, Fry’s own love of language and his book “Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined.” “It’s a miraculous thing about Greek mythology that there is a timeline and a chronology,” Fry says. “It’s probably reverse-engineered by Hesiod and Homer and the later poets, obviously. But nonetheless, it has a shape, a beginning and an end, which other mythic structures don’t seem to have. And they’re so deep in the — I hesitate to use such a cliché, but I can’t avoid it — in the DNA of our own culture and art that it’s part of who we are.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

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'the goon squad': read what happened the night former lawmen assaulted 2 black men.

Former Rankin County deputies and a former Richland officer plead guilty to federal charges

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Five former Rankin County sheriff's deputies and a former Richland officer who have pleaded guilty to federal charges were known as "The Goon Squad," according to federal court documents.

They were called that "because of their willingness to use excessive force and not to report it," according to the newly unsealed documents that detail what led to the charges against Brett McAlpin, Jeffrey Middleton, Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Daniel Opdyke and Joshua Hartfield.

The incident took place Jan. 24, 2023, at a home in Braxton. According to federal investigators, McAlpin, who at the time was chief investigator for the Rankin County Sheriff's Office, got a call "from one of his white neighbors" who told him that "several Black males had been staying at the property and that neighbor had observed suspicious behavior."

That's when investigators said McAlpin reached out to "The Goon Squad," of which Middleton, a lieutenant with the RCSO, was the leader. Middleton is accused of sending a group message to Elward and Opdyke telling them of "a mission." The group met up, along with Hartfield and Dedmon.

According to the documents, they kicked in the doors to the home and found Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker. The two men, who are Black, complied with orders and both were handcuffed and then tased, federal officials said.

Dedmon is accused of demanding "to know where the drugs were" before allegedly taking out his gun and firing it toward the back of the house. Parker told him there were no drugs.

The defendants, who are all white, are accused of then taunting Parker and Jenkins using racial slurs.

The court documents detail how Opdyke and Dedmon allegedly used a sex toy and a BB gun they found in the house to torture the two men, including threatening to rape them with it.

According to the charges, while Jenkins and Parker were still handcuffed, they were held down and the deputies "poured milk, alcohol and chocolate syrup on their faces and into their mouths," forcing them to drink it. Then, they allegedly threw eggs at the two men before ordering them to shower and change their clothes.

Opdyke, Middleton, Dedmon and McAlpin are accused in the documents of beating Parker with pieces of wood and a metal sword before tasing him and Jenkins repeatedly.

A section of the document titled "The Mock Execution and Shootings," accuses Elward of forcing Jenkins onto his knees and sticking the gun into his mouth and pulling the trigger.

"The unloaded gun clicked but did not discharge. Elward racked the slide, intending to dry-fire a second time. When Elward put the gun back into (Jenkins') mouth and pulled the trigger, the gun discharged. The bullet lacerated (Jenkins') tongue, broke his jaw and exited out of his neck," prosecutors said in the document.

As Jenkins lay bleeding, the group devised what federal investigators titled "The Cover Story." They are accused of planting and tampering with evidence to support a false story of a drug raid.

McAlpin is accused of "suggesting" to Parker and Jenkins that if they "stuck with the cover story, then McAlpin would make sure" they were released from jail.

Hartfield is accused of taking the victims' soiled clothes and trying to burn them before throwing them into the woods. He is also accused of removing the hard drive from the home's surveillance system and later throwing into a creek in Florence.

Tap here to read the full list of charges.

Mississippi Today

Pulitzer Prize-winning Nonprofit News

Goon Squad Officer is Sentenced to 20 Years in Mississippi Torture Cases

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Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield are examining the power of sheriffs’ offices in Mississippi as part of The Times’s  Local Investigations Fellowship . Jerry Mitchell is an investigative reporter who has examined civil rights-era cold murder cases in the state for more than 30 years.

Two former law enforcement officers who were part of a self-styled “Goon Squad” that tortured, sexually assaulted and beat residents of a Mississippi county were given hefty prison sentences on Tuesday for brutally attacking two Black men last year.

A federal judge ordered Hunter Elward, who shot one of the victims in the mouth, to serve 20 years in prison. Jeffrey Middleton, a former lieutenant who supervised the Goon Squad, was sentenced to nearly 18 years.

Mr. Elward broke down in tears as he turned to face Eddie Parker, 36, and Michael Jenkins, 33, and apologized for what he had done to them.

Outside the courtroom, Mr. Jenkins, the man Mr. Elward shot in the face during what was described as a mock execution, said that he did not forgive Mr. Elward. “If he wouldn’t have gotten caught, he would still be doing the same thing,” Mr. Jenkins said.

Four other officers will face sentencing this week in the federal courthouse in Jackson. All of them pleaded guilty this summer to federal civil rights offenses related to their brutal treatment of Mr. Parker, Mr. Jenkins and a white man, Alan Schmidt, who was assaulted in a separate incident in December 2022.

So far charges against officers in Rankin County have been narrowly focused on these two incidents, but residents in impoverished pockets of the county say that the sheriff’s department has routinely targeted them with similar levels of violence.

Last November, The New York Times and Mississippi Today published an investigation revealing that for nearly two decades, deputies in the Rankin sheriff department, many of whom called themselves the Goon Squad, would barge into homes in the middle of the night, handcuff people and torture them for information or confessions.

In the pursuit of drug arrests, the deputies rammed a stick down one man’s throat until he vomited, dripped molten metal onto another man’s skin and held people down and beat them until they were bloody and bruised, according to dozens of people who said they witnessed or experienced the raids.

Many of those who said they had experienced violence filed lawsuits or formal complaints detailing their encounters with the department. A few said they had contacted Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey directly, only to be ignored.

Sheriff Bailey, who has denied knowledge of the incidents, has faced calls to resign by local activists and the N.A.A.C.P. He has said he will not step down.

The sheriff’s department in Rankin County, a suburban area just outside Jackson, came to national attention last year after five Rankin County deputies and a Richland police detective raided the home of Mr. Parker and his friend, Mr. Jenkins, following a tip about suspicious activity.

The officers handcuffed the men and tortured them by shocking them repeatedly with Tasers, beating them and sexually assaulting them with a sex toy. Mr. Elward put his gun into Mr. Jenkins’s mouth and shot him, shattering his jaw and nearly killing him.

“They tried to take my manhood away from me,” Mr. Jenkins said in a statement to the court on Tuesday morning. “I don’t ever think I’ll be the person I was.”

The officers destroyed evidence and, to justify the shooting, falsely claimed that Mr. Jenkins had pointed a BB gun at them, federal prosecutors said.

During Mr. Middleton’s portion of the hearing, a federal prosecutor revealed that deputies under his supervision had carried commemorative coins printed with the words “Goon Squad.”

Early versions of the coin had an image of a confederate flag on one side and a noose on the other, said the prosecutor, Erin Chalk.

She also said that deputies had repeatedly shocked Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Parker with their Tasers, as if they were playing “Taser hot potato,” competing to see who could inflict the most damage.

Mr. Middleton apologized to the victims and his community. “I have failed every law enforcement officer in the United States because my actions have tarnished the badge,” he said.

Judge Tom Lee of U.S. District Court chastised Mr. Middleton for not stopping the attack or taking responsibility for the actions of the men under his command.

“Mr. Middleton was not a mere bystander,” he said. “He’s the superior officer. He knew what was happening. He could have stopped it.”

Both Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Parker said they were satisfied with the sentences handed down by Judge Lee.

Over the next two days, the other officers involved in the incident, who each could be sentenced to a decade or more in prison, will appear in federal court in Jackson.

Prosecutors are expected to detail the officers’ violent actions, and victims will have an opportunity to share their stories.

Two of the department’s deputies will also be sentenced for violently attacking Mr. Schmidt, 28.

Malcolm Holmes, a professor in the department of criminal justice and sociology at the University of Wyoming, said that the Goon Squad case was “going to be one that finds its way into the chronicles of history.”

“There’s so much well-documented evidence that this is a pattern of behavior,” he said, noting that the case revealed “something we’ve covered up for a long time, particularly in rural America.”

The sentencing hearings this week are expected to reveal more details about violence perpetrated by Rankin County deputies, including what happened to Mr. Schmidt.

In an interview with The Times and Mississippi Today last week, Mr. Schmidt spoke publicly for the first time about what happened in December 2022 when a Rankin County deputy pulled him over for driving with an expired tag.

According to the federal indictment, deputies Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward and Daniel Opdyke arrived at the scene shortly afterward. Two other deputies, including the one who pulled Mr. Schmidt over, were also present throughout the arrest, Mr. Schmidt said. Neither has been criminally charged.

Mr. Schmidt said the deputies accused him of stealing tools from his boss, and then Mr. Dedmon pressed a gun to his head and fired it into the air before threatening to dump his body in the Pearl River.

Mr. Dedmon and the other deputies punched Mr. Schmidt and held his arm in a fire ant hill, then shocked him repeatedly with a Taser, Mr. Schmidt said.

Mr. Dedmon also pressed his genitals against the man’s face and bare buttocks as he yelled for help and kicked at the deputy, Mr. Schmidt said.

Rankin County District Attorney Bubba Bramlett has begun to review and dismiss criminal cases that had involved Goon Squad members, his office confirmed last week, but Mr. Bramlett declined to share details about the cases under review.

State lawmakers introduced a bill in January that would expand oversight of Mississippi law enforcement, allowing the state board that certifies officers to investigate and revoke the licenses of officers accused of misconduct, regardless of whether they are criminally charged. Lawmakers have said that the Goon Squad and several other incidents of alleged police misconduct in Mississippi helped prompt the bill.

The Mississippi House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to pass the bill last week. The state senate is expected to vote on the measure in the coming weeks.

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by Nate Rosenfield, Jerry Mitchell and Brian Howey, Mississippi Today March 19, 2024

This <a target="_blank" href="https://mississippitoday.org/2024/03/19/goon-squad-officer-is-sentenced-to-20-years-in-mississippi-torture-cases/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://mississippitoday.org">Mississippi Today</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://i0.wp.com/mississippitoday.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/MT_icon-logo-favicon-1.png?fit=134%2C150&amp;ssl=1" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;"><img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://mississippitoday.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=1113453&amp;ga4=G-VSX4B701MS" style="width:1px;height:1px;">

Nate Rosenfield Investigative reporter

Nate Rosenfield is an investigative reporter at the Mississippi Center of Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today, where he is working with The New York Times on a series on the abuse of power by sheriffs across Mississippi. A 2023 graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he was a Stabile Investigative Fellow at Columbia Journalism School, where he completed an investigation into the impacts of heat illness on outdoor workers, which was published by the Guardian and Grist. He is the recipient of the Brown Institute's Magic Grant for his project Commons, a tool he and a team of data journalists are designing for investigative reporters that uses AI to analyze public comments on proposed federal regulations.

Jerry Mitchell Investigative Reporter

The stories of investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell have helped put four Klansmen and a serial killer behind bars. His stories have also helped free two people from death row, exposed injustices and corruption, prompting investigations and reforms as well as the firings of boards and officials. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a longtime member of Investigative Reporters & Editors, and a winner of more than 30 other national awards, including a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant. After working for three decades for the statewide Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell left in 2019 and founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.

Brian Howey

Brian Howey is an award-winning investigative reporter at the Mississippi Center of Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today. His stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. His stories have also appeared in WIRED magazine. He earned his master’s degree at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and has worked as a freelancer covering everything from policing to wedgefish.

‘Goon Squad’ hearings reveal culture of violence in Mississippi sheriff’s office

JACKSON, Miss. — Sentencing hearings this week for six law enforcement officers, some of whom were members of the Goon Squad, revealed a disturbing portrait of a Mississippi sheriff’s department that encouraged deputies to use extreme violence as a policing tool.

Prosecutors, along with several of the deputies who were sentenced, described a toxic culture in which senior officers directed the men they oversaw to humiliate and torture people suspected of crimes.

Young deputies said they saw violence as a way to earn promotions and to live up to the expectations of their supervisors, who were considered heroes of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department.

In court this week, Christian Dedmon, a former narcotics detective, said that a culture of misconduct reigned at the sheriff’s office and that he rose through the ranks at the department because of his willingness “to do bad things.”

Dedmon and five other former law enforcement officers from Rankin County were sentenced this week to prison terms for federal civil rights violations stemming from the torture and sexual assault of two Black men, Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, in January 2023.

The officers, who pleaded guilty last summer, shocked both men with Tasers and abused them with a sex toy. During what was described as a mock execution, one of the officers shot Jenkins in the mouth, nearly killing him.

Three of the deputies were also sentenced for their roles in the beating of Alan Schmidt in December 2022, when Dedmon shocked Schmidt with a Taser, and then pressed his genitals against the man’s face and bare buttocks while he was handcuffed.

Judge Tom Lee of U.S. District Court sentenced the last of the officers Thursday. Brett McAlpin, a senior detective who has been described as the Goon Squad’s ringleader, was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison. Joshua Hartfield, a narcotics detective for the Richland Police Department, received a 10-year sentence.

An investigation by Mississippi Today and The New York Times last year exposed a decadeslong reign of terror by nearly two dozen Rankin County deputies, several of them high-ranking investigators who reported directly to Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey.

In pursuit of drug arrests, the deputies shoved a stick down one man’s throat until he vomited, dripped molten metal onto another man’s skin and held people down and beat them until they were bloody and bruised, according to dozens who said they had witnessed or experienced the raids.

Residents in impoverished communities in Rankin County have complained that deputies targeted them for years, routinely barging into homes without warrants and violently shaking them down for information on drug use.

Testimony at the hearings this week shed new light on why the violence had been so widespread.

Christopher Perras, a federal prosecutor, said Thursday that McAlpin had been involved in at least nine incidents over the past five years in which the detective led deputies in “brutalizing people with impunity.”

Perras said McAlpin, the former chief investigator, had forced younger deputies “to do his dirty work for him.”

“McAlpin is the one who molded these men into what they became,” Perras said. “He modeled that behavior for young impressionable officers, and it’s no wonder that they followed his lead.”

Jeremy Travis Paige, a local resident, told reporters last year that he was one of McAlpin’s many victims. During a 2018 raid of his home in Pearl, Mississippi, deputies led by McAlpin waterboarded and beat Paige until his face was blackened and bloodied. Throughout the encounter, he said, McAlpin instructed deputies to carry out the attack.

“He was the captain, and they were the hit men,” he said Thursday. “He just sat in the chair and watched them do everything.”

Paige was one of many people who said they filed federal lawsuits, submitted formal complaints or tried to contact Bailey directly to complain about McAlpin and other deputies’ behavior. He was also one of multiple people who arrived to jail with obvious injuries, according to booking photos obtained by the Times and Mississippi Today.

Jeffery Reynolds, a lawyer representing Daniel Opdyke, a former patrol deputy who was sentenced to almost 18 years in prison, said his client viewed McAlpin as a father figure and followed him “right or wrong, without question.” But while complaints about McAlpin continued to surface, Reynolds said, Bailey kept promoting him.

“Where’s the true leadership? Why aren’t they in this court?” Reynolds said.

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Bailey, who did not attend the sentencing hearings, has repeatedly denied knowledge of his deputies’ actions. But policing experts said the details revealed at the hearings cast further doubt on his claims.

“There were so many red flags in this case, it seems unbelievable to think that higher-ups didn’t have some knowledge of this,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. “Officers were held accountable for these egregious crimes, but it should not have taken 20 years.”

In a Thursday news release, Bailey said his department was dedicated to preserving the safety and security of county residents and that the sheriff’s office fully cooperated with state and federal authorities during their investigation of his former deputies.

“As the duly elected and acting sheriff of Rankin County, I will remain committed to the betterment of this county and this sheriff’s department moving forward,” he said.

Erin Chalk, a prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, revealed that investigators have recorded violent incidents beyond those that led to the federal convictions.

Speaking in court, Chalk referenced an investigative report that had tallied “countless other missions” by Dedmon and others. According to the Justice Department investigation, “mission” was a code word used by deputies referring to a violent arrest.

Jeffrey Middleton, a former lieutenant, created a sense of brotherhood among the deputies by designing challenge coins, mementos commonly shared among military and law enforcement officers to create a sense of camaraderie in exclusive units.

The Goon Squad challenge coin features Middleton’s name above three cartoonish mobsters. During Middleton’s hearing Wednesday, Chalk said the original design featured images of a Confederate flag and a noose.

Local prosecutors are now reviewing criminal cases that involved Goon Squad members and are determining whether to dismiss them. District Attorney Bubba Bramlett of Rankin County declined to share details about the cases under review.

Parker and Jenkins said they hoped federal authorities investigate Sheriff Bailey next.

“He’s the head of the snake,” Parker said. “We got our foot on his tail now.”

UPDATE: The "Goon Squad" Finally Got What They Deserved‪.‬ Good Wine & Great Laughs Podcast.

On this episode you will listen to reports from Dr. Rashad Richey on the sentencing of the former cops and members of the so called "Goon Squad". --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casanova-the-comedian/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casanova-the-comedian/support

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