Editor's Letter

Tales of the Unexpected

In rawboned West Texas, a Honduran businessman is jumped by the Feds on a drug bust—but mysteriously let go. In a swell comer of ManHhattan, a gorgeous Ford model forks out $75,000 for "precious" gemstones to a decorator turned psychic whose followers believe he is an alien from the star Arcturus. In the Frankfurt suburb of Bad Homburg, a superstar German banker helping to broker the East-West reunion is blown up in his motorcade. Three fateful moments and the beginnings of three very different investigations by Vanity Fair reporters.

In "Hidden Agendas," on page 102, Mort Rosenblum follows a trail of drugs and political sophistry from a judge's chambers in Lubbock to an ex-ambassador's office in Washington and a rendezvous in Tegucigalpa. It leads him to address a question to President Bush, who is attending a drug summit in Colombia this month: Are you serious? For Rosenblum concludes that, despite the fanfare surrounding the drug war and Noriega's capture, the president's men are playing deaf, dumb, and blind to the huge amounts of cocaine being shipped into the U.S. by Honduras's top military brass.

In "East Side Alien," on page 172, Marie Brenner breaks the story of a Manhattan mountebank, Frederick von Mierers, who is at the center of a millenarian cult which has seduced and terrified some of the most beautiful young people in New York. Von Mierers calls his movement the Eternal Values. The irony is that his own values appear to have been warped by a crazed climb from the margins of New York society.

In "Death of a Europower," on page 164, Alan Friedman portrays the rise of a man of vision who is murdered at the climactic moment of his career. Alfred Herrhausen, the head of the mighty Deutsche Bank, was poised to play a central role in the new Europe when his car passed through a thin beam of lethal light that triggered the waiting bomb.

Vanity Fair casts its net far and wide in its commitment to narrative drive. These three features are as significant as they are compelling, fragments of civilizations under stress.

Editor in chief