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It was a September night in 2020 when the fire torched the Red Mountain Travel Plaza. Residents of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone nation watched as the only gas station and grocery store for miles around vanished amid towering orange flames and acrid smoke.
The convenience store was where the approximately 250 residents went to buy snacks, tobacco and essentials. Without it, they would have to drive more than an hour for major provisions. What’s more, a safe stashed in the back room of the store that tribal officials said held nearly $19,000 in cash allegedly burned up. These were a portion of the profits from a cannabis farm down the road – 20 acres of land that were the subject of much anger and anxiety on the reservation – and the tribe was counting on them.
One tribal official alleged that law enforcement from outside the tribe suspected arson, but no one was charged. Many people in the community suspected that someone had set fire to the gas station so they could make off with the cash. That was never proved. For most at Fort McDermitt, the damage was emblematic of something more troubling: a mismanaged venture that never realized its promise.
“We need to recover what we lost here,” said Jerry Tom, an elder of the tribe, whose relentless search for answers came to a head this year. “Nothing good has come of the cannabis business.”
***
The Northern Paiute-Shoshone-Bannock people from Fort McDermitt call themselves Atsakudokwa Tuviwa ga yu, or People of the Red Mountain. Their territory, which straddles Nevada and Oregon, lies among wide expanses of sage brush, with the nearest town, Winnemucca, 74 miles away.
Driving up Route 95 from Reno, a person can go for hours without seeing another car. The road passes several landmarks important to the tribe, including a peak that served as a lookout when fighting army cavalry in the 1860s. Bitterness still burns about the exploitation of lands once governed by Indigenous people.
Tucked away in the high desert, the reservation offers little in the way of work. The lucky few have ranches, or work at the Say When Casino down the road, the tribal government or school. Many trek three hours to Boise, Idaho, or further to work in mines.
Over the past decade, public attitudes and state laws around cannabis have relaxed, resulting in a booming legal weed market worth an estimated $35bn nationally. In theory, the US’s 574 federally recognized tribes have much to gain from it. In total, they retain about 56m acres of land in federal trust on which to grow, in addition to reservation lands. Being sovereign nations, they can largely use the land however they want, unimpeded by federal prohibitions on growing and selling marijuana. For Fort McDermitt in particular, profits from weed could translate into badly needed jobs and money for schooling and infrastructure.
But cannabis is a risky business. Bad weather can ruin crops. It can take years to turn a profit. Due to the federal ban on weed, national agencies do not regulate Indigenous marijuana enterprises as they would casinos, leaving supervision to the Native nations, which often face limited resources and restrictions on jurisdiction. (Fort McDermitt, for instance, does not have its own police force, so it must rely on the county sheriff and Bureau of Indian Affairs officers stationed an hour or more away.) Tribes generally can’t get bank loans from big banks for the ventures and aren’t familiar with cannabis cultivation, so they have to bring in outside experts and investors. All of this and the cash-based nature of the business can make Indian Country vulnerable to deals that go wrong.
That’s exactly what happened when three white men from Oregon – Kevin Clock, Eli Parris and Darian Stanford – and their Native American collaborators sought to make money from Indigenous land. By the time they cleared out, seven years later, more than a gas station had gone up in smoke.
***
It was 2015, and the private investor Kevin Clock was looking for a win.
He and his friend Joe DeLaRosa had recently visited Vancouver, Washington, to check out a popular weed dispensary, and he’d had his eye on cannabis ever since. “We realized it was a money maker,” said Clock, whose background was in “development and land use and things”, in an initial interview this spring. (He then declined to answer further questions about the operation.)
That got him thinking about Nevada, where an initiative to legalize recreational weed was to be voted on the following year, and specifically Native nations, where he thought cannabis retail stores and farms could find success. Clock, a boisterous character with a knack for working a crowd, believed he could connect with Indigenous communities because he had attended high school with Siletz people in Oregon and had married a Native Hawaiian. “It’s a similar culture,” he said.
To help oversee future operations, Clock roped in Eli Parris, a quiet outdoorsman from Oregon with a background in real estate and finance who grew weed privately. To facilitate Indigenous outreach, Clock counted on DeLaRosa, the then tribal chair of the Burns Paiute of Oregon. DeLaRosa, who had previously worked as the financial manager in a car dealership, couldn’t convince his own community to open a weed operation, but the team thought he could persuade sister tribes to create a “Paiute pipeline”, whereby some nations would grow cannabis and others would sell it.
In January 2016, the group contacted the leaders of the Fort McDermitt Tribal Council, which governs the reservation, to propose developing a marijuana farm on tribal lands.
Clock and his associates promised to bring in the necessary funding to get the operation off the ground. They said the farm would be 100% owned by the tribe and that the venture could create much-needed jobs and generate money to improve roads, housing, education and health for years to come. The project could also serve as an anchor for other businesses in this remote area.
Hearings were called on the reservation to present the proposal to the community. Cars filled the parking lot and people crowded into the building. Several tribal members who were present recalled promises that the farm would enrich the tribe. Some interpreted that to mean that they would each get a per capita share of the profits, one way revenues from tribal casinos are distributed.
But some residents had concerns about whether it was legal to lease land to the cannabis operation. Many of the older residents feared that introducing a marijuana business would worsen substance abuse problems already plaguing the community. Others found Clock pushy.
“They came in and painted a pretty picture and promised the tribe this and that,” said Arlo Crutcher, a local rancher who attended the public meetings (and who became the tribal council chair a few years later). “I said, ‘This doesn’t sound too good.’”
He felt the men dodged questions about operational matters and didn’t allow time for tribal officials to seriously consider the offer.
Crutcher thought others in the community were too trusting of the men’s pitch. He noted that his tribe lacked the business savvy of richer nations with longstanding businesses. Fort McDermitt had never had an enterprise of this scale. “The investors knew they were dealing with gullible persons, and they took advantage of that.”
Still, representatives from Fort McDermitt reached an agreement with Clock’s team in November 2016, heavily pushed by Tildon Smart, who soon became the tribal council chair. They established a 10-year partnership that would first pay Clock’s company back any investments and then would give it 50% of revenue, an unusually large cut for businessmen not from the tribe. Like other tribal nations in Nevada, Fort McDermitt was to collect a cannabis sales tax to fund essential services in the community. The outsiders would take care of all the financing and operations.
Soon after, Clock brought in Darian Stanford, a litigator who had worked as a deputy district attorney prosecuting gang violence and major felonies in Oregon, to help with legal matters. Attorneys from a law firm where Stanford eventually worked were retained at $400 an hour, and a five-member cannabis commission was set up by the tribal council and tasked with oversight of the operation to ensure things remained above board. The commission was supposed to be accountable to the nation’s ultimate authority: the tribal council. In an unusual move, Parris, an outsider, as well as two members from the tribal council, were on the cannabis commission, placing them in a position of supervising their own efforts.
According to Mary Jane Oatman, of the Nez Perce Tribe, who helms the Indigenous Cannabis Industry Association, that should have raised a red flag immediately. “There was no system of checks and balances,” said Oatman, whose advocacy group guides tribes navigating the legal weed realm. “They have members of the tribal council taking off their hats and then putting on the hat of the cannabis commission. They should have had an accountability system.” (Smart and Stanford defended the practice, saying it allowed for the easy flow of information between the council and commission.) Stanford also became the tribe’s judge a couple of years later, putting him at the center of legal disputes in the community; he recused himself from matters related to the business.
Around 2018, the newly created joint venture – Quinn River Farms, named for the ribbon of water that flows through Fort McDermitt – was hard at work, purchasing soil and farm equipment, leveling land, installing greenhouses and readying a building for storing and processing the harvests. Although Clock and his associates never became fixtures in the community, Parris frequently checked in on the site. They brought in a foreman and hired dozens of tribal members who learned how to cultivate plants, cut buds and make pre-rolls. They were often paid in cash, a common industry practice but one that makes it hard to keep track of costs.
This was the vision: an emerald sea of towering marijuana plants that would change lives, with goods sold to another Paiute tribe and businesses in Las Vegas, where new weed lounges and dispensaries were expected to open. Over the course of its operation, investors would pour in millions, in the hopes that it would be so successful that it could set a standard across Nevada and for other tribes.
***
The outsiders moved quickly to realize that vision. The deal stipulated that a new LLC set up by Clock and his partners would act as general manager and contract with consultants on behalf of Quinn River Farms, always in coordination with the tribe.
To that end, Clock’s LLC brought in Ranson Shepherd, a jiujitsu instructor originally from Hawaii who had been a part of other successful cannabis enterprises. He took over management and sales for the operation.
But Billy Bell, a member of the tribe’s cannabis commission, said in a memo that he later wrote to the tribe’s lawyer that he was concerned about incomplete paperwork. (Bell declined to comment for this story.) He said he had seen one version of the agreement with Shepherd where the signatory line for the tribe, oddly, bore the name of Parris, the only outsider on the commission.
The tribe was supposed to be an equal partner in the venture. Bell, however, felt it had been sidelined completely.
Clock’s LLC and Shepherd “left the Tribe out of important and crucial business decision-making decisions over the cannabis project”, Bell said in his memo.
Tildon Smart, the tribal chair and cannabis commission member, was perturbed as well. Promises of additional equipment were going unmet, he added.
“[Clock] promised us greenhouses within so many months and that never happened,” he said. (Clock did not respond to request for comment about this and other allegations.)
In a memo after one of the first harvests, Smart emailed Clock and Shepherd’s teams to share his frustrations that “everyone was doing their own thing”, and that the tribe was being “ignored” and “no longer considered partners in this project”.
Elders in the community also grew suspicious, Jerry Tom among them. After being away for years working in gold mines, Tom had recently returned home to Fort McDermitt, and he was disturbed to see that while the farm had started to grow cannabis, he and other members of the tribe knew little about exactly how much money the operation made or spent. He wondered when, if ever, they could expect to see per capita payments from the venture.
“Nothing was disclosed to the tribal members,” Tom said. “No one knows anything about it.”
Crutcher, the rancher, concurred: “We had no clue how they were operating.”
Unease over the project intensified when the 2019 harvest went poorly. The project’s leaders blamed a hard freeze for hurting crops, and therefore sales. The tribe received about $100,000 from the 2018 harvest, and at least $25,000 from 2019, but didn’t know if it was owed more. Bell said he feared the operation was generating more debts than revenue.
Tribal members wondered about the box trucks that were leaving the farm at night and where they were going. Fort McDermitt residents saw half a dozen shipping out at a time.
All transactions were done in cash, due to the difficulty of banking in the cannabis industry. Crutcher said he had seen members of the cannabis commission, investors and tribal council members bring piles of money to an administration building on the reservation to be counted.
Concerns about the cannabis operation cost Smart, the tribal chair, his re-election in November 2019. His successor was eventually replaced, this time by Crutcher.
During this time, Clock referred tribal members’ many questions to Shepherd, who didn’t produce detailed financial statements or invoices, according to Bell’s memo.
Then in September 2020, the travel plaza burned down with the alleged $19,000 in profits inside. An internal investigation handled by Smart, now a tribal administrator, never produced definitive answers.
In an interview, Smart said he had moved the cash from the tribal administration building to the gas station before the fire to keep it out of the hands of incoming tribal council members. He denied accusations by some tribal members that he took the money for himself and said it had burned in the blaze.
***
With the travel plaza left in ruins, relations between the outsiders and the community went from bad to worse.
In October 2021, looking to boost the business, Clock and the team brought in more investors and signed a deal to cultivate more acres. According to documents shared with Bell, the existing investors had run up more than $5m in expenses, including $63,258.85 in flights as well as interest on loans from other companies, equipment, salaries and shipping. Under this latest agreement, the new investors – a joint venture involving Shepherd and a company called Cannabis Life Sciences (CLS) – would pour another $6m into Quinn River. Shepherd had also teamed up with CLS to produce pre-rolls projected to bring in $600,000 in monthly revenue.
Tribal officials were concerned that these partnerships were moving too quickly, and that deals were being negotiated without their input. Each new investor represented a hit to the tribe’s overall revenue share, steadily decreasing what the tribe expected to earn.
Then jobs for local residents on the farm began to disappear, even though Clock’s group had told the tribal council that harvests had rebounded. The number of Native employees dropped and workers from outside the reservation began to appear.
Even fewer cannabis crops were planted in 2022 than the year before, according to Bell’s memo. When he visited the fields that summer, a few plots lay empty. The foreman later told him that the plants eventually put in the ground might not flower due to a late start.
Sales sank and workers began dismantling equipment and hauling it out. “They just packed up and left,” Crutcher said.
The only public information about Quinn River’s finances, beyond what Bell and other tribal administrators could gather, is in SEC filings by CLS. One shows a loss of more than $100,000 from the business for the year ending 21 May 2022. That was the last time Quinn River sold any cannabis. CLS reported even greater losses for the year ending May 2023 and pulled out of the deal, saying the venture Shepherd was involved with had defaulted on its $3m contribution. The remaining workers were laid off.
CLS declined several requests for comment. In an interview, Shepherd denied that he had defaulted, adding that his venture didn’t owe $3m, as he had already invested in the necessary infrastructure. “Why would you invest into something that you already built?”
Fed up, the tribe enlisted its lawyer to contact Clock and Parris. “The Tribe needs detailed financial reports of the expenses and income to the business, not simply summaries,” the lawyer wrote. “The tribe needs to know when the expenses incurred have been paid off so that the profits can be determined.”
Clock’s original group of investors – himself, Parris, Stanford and DeLaRosa – weren’t able to produce the requested documents. Parris said they repeatedly – and unsuccessfully – asked Shepherd for sales records, bank statements and profit and loss statements. “We never saw any paperwork.” Shepherd disagreed, saying he had handed over all the necessary documents. “We provided all documentation,” he said.
Crutcher said the lawyer advised the nation to walk away from the project. “It’s expensive to go after them. So we called it quits.” (The lawyer declined to comment.)
Stanford confirmed that Clock’s group had agreed to terminate the contract and blamed Ranson Shepherd for the lack of financial reporting. “I 1,000% fault Ranson for not providing the financial documents that were requested,” he said. “But I think it’s sloppy, not malicious.”
The original investors’ fault lay “in not ensuring that Ranson did whatever Ranson was supposed to do”, Stanford said.
In the final tally, the cash Clock’s group handed to Fort McDermitt, from 2018 harvest revenues through to April 2022, totaled $564,450, according to a statement Bell provided to the commission. Current and recent tribal leaders don’t know how this sum was calculated, what percentage of profits it entails or whether they were owed more. Whatever the sum, it was far less than they expected to earn. Under Fort McDermitt law, 4% of the profits from the cannabis business were destined for per capita payments. While the amount per person would have been minimal, Fort McDermitt citizens said they have received nothing at all.
Stanford said the nation received quarterly payments and that his and Clock’s company hadn’t made any money. “If you ask me today how much money was made at McDermitt I have no idea. I never saw a penny.”
Parris concurred, saying any money the outsiders were entitled to was given to the tribe. The project generated cash to buy a fire truck and bury elders, he said. “They could have made a lot more and they should have made a lot more, but they made money,” he said. “We left the place better in McDermitt than when we got there. I can 100% sleep on that for the rest of my life.”
DeLaRosa characterized the project as “successful”. He said that members of the group invested “thousands of dollars of their personal funds” to get the project up and running and never made “a single dollar”.
Shepherd also maintains that the tribe was properly compensated despite his being in the red himself. He is facing a lawsuit by an investor named Ting He, who alleged that he failed to pay her back $3m, loaned in May 2021. According to the lawsuit, Shepherd said the money would be used to build greenhouses and water wells and help cultivate the cannabis fields at Fort McDermitt. In return, she would also get a cut of the harvest’s profits.
The lawsuit alleges fraud and the misappropriation of funds, among other charges, and claims that Shepherd provided He with a list of bogus “expenses” incurred by a company he controls. A Nevada district court lists the suit as active, as He’s legal team has been unable to serve Shepherd with a summons and complaint, arguing that he was “no longer responding” to calls or texts or answering the door – even with cars parked in his driveway. No one in Clock’s original group was named in the suit. Asked for comment, Shepherd said: “I can’t speak on that until it’s complete.”
Parris said the group had thoroughly vetted Shepherd ahead of time. When asked if he and the others could have provided oversight, he said: “If somebody signs up to do something and they just don’t do it, what can you do outside of sue them, right?”
***
Jerry Tom won’t let the matter rest, not with so many loose ends. He served on the tribal council in 2019, and from then on collected whatever documents he could related to Quinn River Farms – photos, texts, Facebook messages, videos, contracts, memos, minutes of meetings, legal correspondence and more. The foot-high dossier includes overlapping agreements, some with no signatures. Cashflow statements lack invoices or balance sheets to back them up. An item listing leases for $17,000 doesn’t say who was leasing what. Two promissory notes of $600,000 were written to companies some tribal officials were unfamiliar with.
“We have no idea if loans were paid on time or even at all, or who approved them,” Tom said. Without proper invoices, the tribe lacks a clear or complete picture of the project’s finances.
Tom said that the tribal council and the cannabis commission failed to adequately oversee the project and share information with the community. Their meetings regarding the project were largely closed to the public, and minutes were unavailable.
Tom serves on the elders committee, entrusted with protecting the cultural integrity of the tribe. In March 2024, he and other elders summoned the community to a gathering to discuss the cannabis debacle. Outside the meeting hall, a red painted sign declared: “KEEP YOUR ABORIGINAL RIGHTS!!”
About 50 people filed in for a potluck supper before getting down to business. The older women chatted in Numu Yadooana, the Northern Paiute language, as they ate rabbit stew and beans. Tom served his signature pear and pumpkin pies.
The five members of the committee, seated at a long table up front, called the gathering to order.
“We didn’t see any documents, it was a hush-hush deal,” said Larina Bell, the incoming tribal chair.
“They shared nothing with me,” said Valerie Barr, the tribe’s finance director. “I asked for an audit. The tribe has been left out, completely.”
Speaker after speaker expressed anger, a feeling of being tricked, preyed upon by the outsiders. “Where is the money?” people repeatedly asked. They wanted to know why the tribe had made so little on the venture, and the status of per capita payments.
The session continued for hours. Afterwards, as people stacked chairs and cleared paper plates, Tom called the meeting a “catharsis”. This was the first time the community had come together to process. “It was a trauma for our people. We have to get to the bottom of it.”
***
The controversies kept piling up. Unbeknown to the people of Fort McDermitt, Clock’s group was working with four other Nevada tribes on cannabis ventures through a constellation of LLCs around the same time Quinn River took in its first harvest. Tribal representatives and Indigenous leaders who did business with them described the men’s process as cultivating a relationship with someone prominent in the tribe and keeping other officials at arm’s length. Between 2019 and 2023, nearly all of these ventures faced pushback.
The Las Vegas Paiute left the partnership, according to the tribe’s general counsel. The partnership’s dissolution was hashed out privately, according to industry sources. The Pyramid Lake Paiute shut down their grow in 2019 after just a few months and pursued the outsiders in tribal court, according to minutes of the tribal council. A construction contractor filed a $2.3m mechanics lien against Clock’s group for alleged non-payment.
Controversy still swirls around the Newe dispensary, opened in 2020 with the Elko, one of the four bands of the Te-Moak of the Western Shoshone. A former tribal chair of Elko, Felix Ike, complained of a lack of transparency around the decision to open the dispensary and a lack of proper law enforcement, according to reporting in the Elko Daily. He and others tried, unsuccessfully, to get it shut down.
Clock denied there had been issues with these tribes. He said that the business model was to go in, get a project up and running and then hand over management to the tribe. That never happened at Fort McDermitt.
As for Pyramid Lake, Stanford called the nation’s decision to shut down the grow “terrible” and costly.
He blamed many of the setbacks, including at Fort McDermitt, on changes in tribal leadership. “The biggest challenge in this entire industry is turnaround in tribal leadership,” he said. “There’s no institutional memory sometimes.”
DeLaRosa, the tribal liaison for the investors, said Fort McDermitt’s “desolate” location made it hard to attract contractors and created other challenges. He added that divisions within Native nations could complicate doing business. “Sometimes it’s just the dynamics of the community.”
Still, Clock, Parris and Stanford kept moving. In 2021 they submitted a proposal to work with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina – a comparatively wealthy nation that owns a successful casino, Harrah’s, in the Great Smoky Mountains.
This operation got off the ground: a glitzy 10,000 sq ft dispensary, state-of-the-art processing equipment and a 22-acre grow. The tribe financed the joint venture with more than $30m of its own money, rather than relying solely on external investors as Fort McDermitt had done.
At the launch, Clock and the others seemed to be running the show. Clock darted about, slapping people on the back, while Stanford directed people on where to stand for photo ops. Parris and DeLaRosa also attended the event, mostly keeping to the sidelines.
Morale seemed high among the 100 employees. But this project, too, faced concerns about transparency. The previous year, the then principal chief, Richard Sneed, vetoed allocating an additional $64m until the joint venture accounted for the $30m invested by the tribe thus far. He worried about potential cost overruns, and the possible use of casino revenues, which could endanger federal grants. He wanted to see a proper audit.
Sneed said in an interview that he hadn’t been able to get answers from the venture’s board or the tribal member they hired as the general manager. “I asked some basic questions. Do you have agendas for your meetings? No. Are you keeping minutes? No.”
He said they had also failed to provide him a fiscal management policy and quarterly reports.
Stanford, however, said an independent audit had showed everything was “100% kosher”. The venture’s general manager confirmed the audit had been done.
Sneed lost his re-election in September 2023, and the project moved ahead with a portion of the $64m the tribe had planned to invest.
***
More tribes may soon face a choice about getting into the weed business, after the US justice department proposed regulatory changes to allow the use of cannabis for medicinal, although not recreational, purposes under federal law.
However, the troubles at Fort McDermitt and elsewhere concern Oatman, of the Indigenous Cannabis Industry Association.
“The bigger systemic issue for tribal communities is that everything is so covert and underground, without the insurance and banking that allow entrepreneurs to do due diligence,” she said. “Finding a trusted partner becomes a chicken-and-egg problem because it’s a new industry. Many tribes lack the resources for the foundational work that needs to be done in terms of licensing.”
She encourages tribes to exercise extreme caution when vetting partners and contractors, and not to promise away big consulting fees and equity shares.
At least one tribe has steered clear after hearing what Fort McDermitt and other tribes went through. Bobbi Shongutsie of the Wind River Reservation is looking into opening a cannabis operation on behalf of her tribe in Wyoming. She toured the dispensary at Elko, set up by Clock. She didn’t like the “minimal” security nor that other tribal ventures involving the group had shut down. “That was a red flag,” she said. Her tribe decided to pass on doing business with them.
A separate group of tribes in Nevada took another path entirely and set up their own self-regulated industry that doesn’t rely on outsiders. Oatman said this network, which includes Shoshone and Paiute nations, could serve as a model.
Back at Fort McDermitt, the travel plaza still hasn’t been rebuilt. Cables jut out of the cement between ruined petrol pumps, like metal cobras. The cannabis fields down the road lie fallow. Torn tarps from greenhouses flap in the wind.
Around Christmas 2023, thieves broke into the building that had served as the cannabis processing facility and made off with unsold products, which tribal officials believed were not fit for consumption. Surveillance cameras didn’t work because of unpaid electricity bills. After the burglary, minors as young as fifth grade were seen with cannabis on school property. Tribal officials believe the drugs had come from the work site.
About a month after the theft, officials burned 525lb of cannabis buds and trim and nearly 5,000 pre-rolls and boarded up the building.
During a visit in March, Tom milled about with other elders and former employees who had lost their jobs when the operation shut down. Tom suffers from an old leg injury, and he limped slowly with a brace among the decayed plots. Crutcher, by then the outgoing tribal chair, joined, too. He pondered what to do with an abandoned storage shed, trailer and the skeletons of the greenhouses.
“They promised we would make money, and then, nothing,” said Janice Sam, who used to work at the grow.
Her former co-worker, Wacey Dick, was more direct: “They lied to us.”
The group walked to the storage shed. It held about 20 plastic containers stacked 9ft high and filled with leftover product that hadn’t been torched, at least not yet. Loose piles spilled on the floor, rotting in the moisture.
Crutcher kicked the warped door. “We’ve got to put a plan together, otherwise we’re going to continue to have people coming in and pulling wool over our eyes again.”
As the end of the year drew close, tribal officials said the time for cannabis cultivation had passed. Another group of outsiders had presented a proposal to revive the farm several months earlier. The tribe refused to hear them out.
This story was funded in part by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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Judith Matloff is on the faculty of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in major media, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and the Los Angeles Times
