Wave of Investor Fraud Extends to Ordinary Retirement Savers

Regulators across the country are confronting a wave of investor fraud that is saddling retirement savers with steep losses on complex products that until a few years ago were pitched only to the most sophisticated investors.

Michal Czerwonka for The New York Times

Mary Beck and her husband invested $470,000 in a part ownership of a fleet of luxury cars, a venture that later went bankrupt.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Jeremy C. Stein, a Federal Reserve governor.

The victims are among the millions of Americans whose mutual funds and stock portfolios plummeted in the wake of the financial crisis, and who started searching for ways to make better returns than those being offered by bank deposits and government bonds with minuscule interest rates.

Tens of thousands of them put money into speculative bets promoted by aggressive financial advisers. The investments include private loans to young companies like television production firms and shares in bundles of commercial real estate properties.

Those alternative investments have now had time to go sour in big numbers, state and federal securities regulators say, and are making up a majority of complaints and prosecutions.

“Since the crisis, we’ve seen more and more people reaching out into different types of exotic investments that are a big concern to us,” said William F. Galvin, the Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth.

Last Wednesday, Mr. Galvin’s office ordered one of the nation’s largest brokerage firms, LPL Financial, to pay $2.5 million for improperly selling the real estate bundles, known as nontraded REITs, or real estate investment trusts, to hundreds of state residents from 2006 to 2009, in some cases overloading clients’ accounts with them.

LPL said it agreed, as part of the settlement, to reform its process for selling such alternative investments.

There are few good statistics on the extent of the problem nationally. But cases are mounting in the offices of regulators like A. Heath Abshure, the securities commissioner in Arkansas, where a majority of the 66 open securities cases involve complex investments sold to less sophisticated investors looking for a steady return.

J. Bradley Bennett, chief of enforcement at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, Wall Street’s self-regulatory group, said that for the last two years, 10 staff members have looked at the “proliferation of these products, to understand how they are being sold.”

“It’s got our attention,” he said. “We recognize the trends.”

Brokers promoting bad investments to unsophisticated investors is nothing new. But while the easy prey used to be people looking to get rich quick, the pool has widened to include savers looking for ways to earn the kind of income once reliably available from traditional investments.

Regulators are warning investors that the dangers are unlikely to recede, given the Federal Reserve’s pledge to keep interest rates near zero and the push among financial firms to earn more revenue from so-called alternative investments marketed to retail investors. Brokers are eager to sell these investments because they often bring in higher commissions than standard mutual funds and stocks.

The money that retail investors have in alternative investments in the United States, ranging from baskets of commodities to mutual funds that employ sophisticated trading, more than doubled from 2008 to 2012, to $712 billion from $312 billion, according to McKinsey & Company. Many of the products hold out the promise of higher returns while ostensibly being immune to the volatility of stock markets.

The phenomenon of investors’ actively moving money in pursuit of higher interest rates, known as chasing yield, is reverberating through the economy. Jeremy C. Stein, a Federal Reserve governor, said in a speech on Thursday that he worried that investors desperate for yield could be creating a bubble in widely available investments like junk bonds.

Mary Beck, a furniture business consultant in Pasadena, Calif., said that in 2008, as the stock investments in her husband’s I.R.A. began to fall quickly, the couple moved $470,000 to a new product recommended by their broker.

While the offering was unfamiliar — part ownership in a fleet of luxury cars — Ms. Beck bought the pitch because her broker had been around for years, and the product offered what seemed to be a modest annual interest rate of 7 percent.

“We knew that 12 percent wasn’t realistic, but 7 percent seemed realistic,” Ms. Beck said. “To us, it was a very conservative way to ensure that we’d increase our savings.”

Soon after they stopped receiving interest payments, the Becks lost their money when the venture went bankrupt in 2012. Ms. Beck and her husband have been reconfiguring their retirement and are planning to work longer.

Read More..

For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

Read More..

For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

Read More..

Samsung Challenges Apple’s Cool Factor

Isaac Brekken for The New York Times

Kim Hyun-suk, a Samsung executive vice president, says of mobile devices and TV, “We get most of our ideas from the market.”

Apple, for the first time in years, is hearing footsteps.

The maker of iPhones, iPads and iPods has never faced a challenger able to make a truly popular and profitable smartphone or tablet — not Dell, not Hewlett-Packard, not Nokia, not BlackBerry — until Samsung Electronics.

The South Korean manufacturer’s Galaxy S III smartphone is the first device to run neck and neck with Apple’s iPhone in sales. Armed with other Galaxy phones and tablets, Samsung has emerged as a potent challenger to Apple, the top consumer electronics maker. The two companies are the only ones turning profits in the highly competitive mobile phone industry, with Apple taking 72 percent of the earnings and Samsung the rest.

Yet these two rivals, who have battled in the marketplace and in the courts worldwide, could not be more different. Samsung Electronics, a major part of South Korea’s expansive Samsung Group, makes computer chips and flat-panel displays as well as a wide range of consumer products including refrigerators, washers and dryers, cameras, vacuum cleaners, PCs, printers and TVs.

Where Apple stakes its success on creating new markets and dominating them, as it did with the iPhone and iPad, Samsung invests heavily in studying existing markets and innovating inside them.

“We get most of our ideas from the market,” said Kim Hyun-suk, an executive vice president at Samsung, in a conversation about the future of mobile devices and television. “The market is a driver, so we don’t intend to drive the market in a certain direction,” he said.

That’s in stark contrast to the philosophy of Apple’s founder Steven P. Jobs, who rejected the notion of relying on market research. He memorably said that consumers don’t know what they want.

Nearly everything at Samsung, from the way it does research to its manufacturing, is unlike Apple. It taunts Apple in its cheeky advertisements while Apple stays above the fray.

And the Korean manufacturer may even be putting some pressure on Apple’s world-class designers. Before Apple released the iPhone 5, which had a larger screen than earlier models, Samsung had already been selling phones with even bigger displays, like the 5.3-inch screen Galaxy Note, a smartphone so wide that gadget blogs call it a phablet.

Samsung outspends Apple on research and development: $10.5 billion, or 5.7 percent of revenue, compared with $3.4 billion, or 2.2 percent. (Samsung Electronics is slightly bigger than Apple in terms of revenue — $183.5 billion compared with $156.5 billion — but Apple is larger in terms of stock market value.)

Samsung has 60,000 staff members working in 34 research centers across the globe, including, Russia, Britain, India, Japan, Israel, China and Silicon Valley. It polls consumers and buys third-party research reports, but it also embeds employees in countries to study trends or merely to find inspiration for ideas.

Designers of the Galaxy S III say they drew inspiration from trips to Cambodia and Helsinki, a Salvador Dalí art exhibit and even a balloon ride in an African forest. (It employs 1,000 designers with different backgrounds like psychology, sociology, economy management and engineering.)

“The research process is unimaginable,” said Donghoon Chang, an executive vice president of Samsung who leads the company’s design efforts. “We go through all avenues to make sure we read the trends correctly.” He says that when the company researches markets for any particular product, it is also looking at trends in fashion, automobiles and interior design.

Hangil Song, a Samsung product designer, described a visit to the Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore, where he said he was amazed by the views of the sky, the cityscape and the water. He wanted to create an effect where water was overflowing from the screen. As a result, taps and swipes on the Galaxy S III’s phone screen create a unique ripple effect.

The genesis of the wide Galaxy Note phone reflects that same kind of consumer research. From focus groups and surveys, Samsung found that many respondents wanted a device that was good for handwriting, drawing and sharing notes. Asian-language speakers, in particular, found it easier to write characters on a device using a pen than typing. Those insights led to the Note, a smartphone that comes with a digital pen.

In courts, jury members have said some of Samsung’s research appears to comes closer to copying. Apple sued Samsung in Federal District Court last year for patent infringement and won a $1 billion judgment. One of the most explosive pieces of evidence was a detailed report breaking down each hardware and software feature of the iPhone and how each compared to Samsung phone features. Samsung is fighting the decision in court.

Roy Furchgott contributed reporting.

Read More..

Rome Journal: Itavia Flight 870 Ruling Adds Support to a Theory

Emiliano Grillotti/Associated Press

A police officer near Rome guarded the reconstructed wreckage of Itavia Flight 870, in 2003.

ROME — Itavia Flight 870 was entering the final leg of a routine domestic trip from Bologna, Italy, to Palermo, Sicily, one clear summer evening when it suddenly plunged into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the small island of Ustica, killing all 81 people aboard.

Mechanical failure was ruled out early on, and almost 33 years later, the causes that led to the crash on June 27, 1980, are still a topic of passionate debate in Italy, fueled by three decades of inquiry boards, parliamentary commissions, countless expert reports and one of the longest judicial inquiries in recent Italian history. But despite all that, no formal charges have ever been filed in connection with the crash.

The crash, known as the Ustica affair, has produced legions of conspiracy theories here, the way the Kennedy assassination — or, on a lesser scale, the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in 1996 — have in the United States. But in the Ustica affair, the case for a cover-up is far stronger.

Last week, when Italy’s highest court ruled that the country’s Defense and Transportation Ministries had to compensate the families of some of the victims, the court implicitly acknowledged the most widely accepted theory behind the crash: that a missile fired by a warplane had hit the twin-engine McDonnell Douglas DC-9 on Itavia, a now-defunct domestic Italian airline. But the court did not say where that missile came from.

To conspiracy buffs, it was vindication — to a point.

“It’s like the O. J. Simpson affair, where he got off in criminal court but was found guilty in a civil procedure and had to pay damages,” said Andrea Purgatori, an investigative reporter whose exhaustive book on the disaster and the presumed cover-up was made into a 1992 film.

Over the years, several Air Force officials have been investigated for withholding evidence — wiping clean flight tracks and radar scans — and four generals were tried on charges of treason and obstructing investigations. But no one has been convicted.

In this hothouse atmosphere, it is not surprising that conspiracy theories have proliferated over the years. The crash has been blamed on U.F.O.’s (several Web sites subscribe to this reconstruction) or domestic terrorism (the Bologna train station was bombed not five weeks later, killing 85 and wounding dozens more). In this scenario, the plane went down after a bomb exploded onboard, most likely in the toilet.

The missile theory gained a new impetus in 2008 when Francesco Cossiga, the prime minister at the time of the Ustica affair, said in an interview that the flight had been shot down by French military planes. Mr. Cossiga did not provide further details, nor can he. He died in 2010, at age 82.

Cover-up theories have been fueled through the years by what news reports have described as a “suspiciously high mortality” among military personnel and others connected to the case. (Mr. Cossiga is not included among them.)

Through traffic accidents, shooting deaths and suicides by hanging, there were 36 untimely deaths by 2011, according to a television report about Ustica. The program also cited a number of “bizarre accidents” that befell Ustica witnesses, like being run over by a tricycle and slipping on a banana peel in a Rome subway station.

“What terrifying truth warranted a cover-up at the cost of the lives of all these people?” asked the show’s host, Adam Kadmon, who plays a mysterious masked vigilante who investigates topics like Ustica, underskin microchip implants and, more recently, Michael Jackson’s prophecy about Sept. 11, and favors the French missile theory.

At the time, proponents say, Italy was covertly allowing Libyan aircraft to fly through its airspace undisturbed. They did so by gliding in the slipstream of Italian domestic aircraft, where they could not be detected by radar. On the night of June 27, 1980, there were unsubstantiated reports that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was on one of those planes, the theory goes, and French forces tried to shoot it down to kill the Libyan leader, but hit the DC-9 by mistake. Don’t ask why. It has to do with rebels in North Africa and jockeying for oil concessions between Italy and France.

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Boeing 787 Completes Test Flight

A Boeing 787 test plane flew for more than two hours on Saturday to gather information about the problems with the batteries that led to a worldwide grounding of the new jets more than three weeks ago.

The flight was the first since the Federal Aviation Administration gave Boeing permission on Thursday to conduct in-flight tests. Federal investigators and the company are trying to determine what caused one of the new lithium-ion batteries to catch fire and how to fix the problems.

The plane took off from Boeing Field in Seattle heading mostly east and then looped around to the south before flying back past the airport to the west. It covered about 900 miles and landed at 2:51 p.m. Pacific time.

Marc R. Birtel, a Boeing spokesman, said the flight was conducted to monitor the performance of the plane’s batteries. He said the crew, which included 13 pilots and test personnel, said the flight was uneventful.

He said special equipment let the crew check status messages involving the batteries and their chargers, as well as data about battery temperature and voltage.

FlightAware, an aviation data provider, said the jet reached 36,000 feet. Its speed ranged from 435 to 626 miles per hour.

All 50 of the 787s delivered so far were grounded after a battery on one of the jets caught fire at a Boston airport on Jan. 7 and another made an emergency landing in Japan with smoke coming from the battery.

The new 787s are the most technically advanced commercial airplanes, and Boeing has a lot riding on their success. Half of the planes’ structural parts are made of lightweight carbon composites to save fuel.

Boeing also decided to switch from conventional nickel cadmium batteries to the lighter lithium-ion ones. But they are more volatile, and federal investigators said Thursday that Boeing had underestimated the risks.

The F.A.A. has set strict operating conditions on the test flights. The flights are expected to resume early this week, Mr. Birtel said.

Battery experts have said it could take weeks for Boeing to fix the problems.

Read More..

For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

Read More..

For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

Read More..

Reviewing Three Brands of Tax Preparation Software

TAX preparation is moving to the cloud.

The makers of the better-known tax prep programs — TurboTax, H&R Block at Home and TaxAct — say that many customers, particularly younger ones, prefer Web-based programs to old-fashioned, desktop versions. Web-based programs — techies call this cloud computing — reside on remote servers that customers access via their browsers. They offer the convenience of working on a return from any Internet-connected computer and having that return stored on the software makers’ secure servers.

After spending several days running my family’s tax information through Web and desktop offerings, I learned that I’m old-school. For a decade, I’ve completed our return on my Mac desktop, and I prefer that. Desktop programs may be costlier and, in some ways, clunkier — you must buy them on CD or download them — but they also offer more flexibility.

A single purchase, for example, lets you prepare and file multiple returns, as you might want to do if you’re part of a same-sex couple or if you help family members or friends with their taxes. And you can more easily jump back and forth between the tax return and the interviews the programs use to gather information. That lets you check entries as you make them, as my wife, a C.P.A., insists upon. What you lose in convenience, you gain in control.

Each of the tax preparation programs, whether desktop or online, has strengths and shortcomings. TurboTax is the easiest to use, importing lots of financial information with just a few clicks. H&R Block promises the most reassuring help — its staff will represent you at no extra charge if you’re audited. TaxAct offers the best price. A look at each provider’s offerings shows where it excelled and stumbled in preparing my family’s 2012 return.

TurboTax

TurboTax’s maker, Intuit, has its roots in technology, not taxes, and its facility with bits and bytes shows in its wares. Its desktop and online programs make doing taxes as simple as such a time-eating task can be. If you end up cursing come tax time, the target will be the I.R.S., not your software.

I downloaded the desktop version of TurboTax Premier for $89.99 — though I learned later that I could have paid $10 less if I’d bought it on CD at my local Staples. The download took only a few seconds, as did the import of information from our 2011 return. All of the unchanged data from 2011 — names, addresses, federal ID numbers, even descriptions of business expenses — popped into the right places on the 2012 forms. Even the names of the charities we support carried over. The software also imported my wife’s W-2 and all of the information on our investments from Vanguard, T. Rowe Price and Fidelity. All I had to do was key in details for a few local banks and update the amounts we’d given to charity.

The online version of TurboTax, by contrast, didn’t import as much. My attempt to transfer our 2011 return failed, and an import from one of the fund companies went awry. I inherited an I.R.A., and the money is invested in about a half-dozen funds. Instead of creating an entry for a single 1099-R, the program created a half-dozen, which I had to combine.

Otherwise, the online program looked and worked much the same way as the desktop software. I didn’t have to pay to try it because TurboTax, like H&R Block and TaxAct, doesn’t require online users to pay until they file their returns. Had I filed with the online version of TurboTax Premier, I would have paid $49.99 for a single federal return — the price as it was discounted at the time. But TurboTax says it could rise to as much as $74.99, its list price, before April 15.

 

TurboTax upgraded its assistance features for this year’s tax filing season — a welcome improvement. In the past, I’d found some help links hard to locate and navigate. When I wanted to pose a question to a tax expert, I had to dig around. But not anymore. When I had a question about recording tax-exempt interest, I clicked on the help link, and TurboTax offered a choice between a call and an online chat. Within seconds, I was e-chatting with Marilyn G., and she pointed me to the right spot on the return. We were done in less than five minutes, and I paid nothing extra. I’ve had a tougher time buying jeans online. (All three companies also provide extensive tax-law explanations embedded in their programs.)

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New Focus in Mali Is Finding Militants Who Have Fled Into Mountains

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

A fish market in Konna, Mali, that had been occupied by Islamist rebels. It was the seizure of Konna, in the Mopti region, that provoked France’s military intervention last month.

DAKAR, Senegal — Just as Al Qaeda once sought refuge in the mountains of Tora Bora, the Islamist militants now on the run in Mali are hiding out in their own forbidding landscape, a rugged, rocky expanse in northeastern Mali that has become a symbol of the continued challenges facing the international effort to stabilize the Sahara.

Expelling the Islamist militants from Timbuktu and other northern Malian towns, as the French did swiftly last month, may have been the easy part of retaking Mali, say military officials, analysts and local fighters. Attention is now being focused on one of Africa’s harshest and least-known mountain ranges, the Adrar des Ifoghas.

The French military has carried out about 20 airstrikes in recent days in those mountains, including attacks on training camps and arms depots, officials said. On Thursday, a column of soldiers from Chad, versed in desert warfare, left Kidal, a diminutive, sand-blown regional capital, to penetrate deep into the Adrar, said a spokesman for the Tuareg fighters who accompanied them.

“These mountains are extremely difficult for foreign armies,” said the spokesman, Backay Ag Hamed Ahmed, of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, in a telephone interview from Kidal. “The Chadians, they don’t know the routes through them.”

These areas of grottoes and rocky hills, long a retreat for Tuareg nomads from the region and more recently for extremists from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, will be the scene of the critical next phase in the conflict. It will be the place where the Islamist militants are finally defeated or where they slip away to fight again, military analysts say.

French special forces are very likely already operating in the Adrar des Ifoghas, performing reconnaissance and perhaps preparing rescue operations for French hostages believed to be held in the area, said Gen. Jean-Claude Allard, a senior researcher at the Institute for International and Strategic Relations in Paris. But African forces are likely to be assigned the brunt of the combat operations, going “from well to well, from village to village,” General Allard said.

The few Westerners who have traveled in this inaccessible region bordering Algeria say it differs from Afghanistan in that the mountains are relatively modest in size. But its harsh conditions make it a vast natural fortress, with innumerable hide-outs.

“The terrain is vast and complicated,” said Col. Michel Goya of the French Military Academy’s Strategic Research Institute. “It will require troops to seal off the zone, and then troops for raids. This will take time.”

The number of militants who remain is in dispute, with estimates varying from a few hundred fighters to a few thousand. They are becoming more dispersed and are hiding themselves ever more effectively, Western military officials say.

The French military has been flying fewer sorties over the region in recent days, “from which I deduce a lack of targets,” said a Western military attaché in Bamako, Mali’s capital, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “They are just not finding the same targets. Clearly they are hiding better and dispersing more widely.”

A ranking Malian officer stationed in the northern town of Gao said: “We don’t know how many there are. They have learned to hide where the French can’t find them.”

The militants are versed in survival tactics in the hills, supplying themselves from the nomads who pass through and getting water from the numerous wells and ponds, said Pierre Boilley, an expert on the region from the Sorbonne. Still, the sources of water are an opportunity for the French and Chadian forces, as they can be monitored without too much difficulty, experts said.

“It’s a sort of observation tower on the whole of the Sahara,” General Allard said. The fighters have had years to build installations, modify caves, and stock food, weapons and fuel, he said, and the precise locations of their refuges remain a mystery.

Even if the bulk of the militants have retreated into the mountains, pockets remain around the liberated towns of Timbuktu and Gao, said a French military spokesman, Col. Thierry Burkhard. Last week, French forces patrolling the area around Gao engaged in firefights with militants, some of whom fired rockets, officials said.

“We’re encountering residual jihadist groups that are fighting,” said Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s defense minister.

On Friday, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a military checkpoint in Gao, wounding a soldier, an act that provided further evidence of the continued threat of the militants.

Adam Nossiter reported from Dakar, and Peter Tinti from Gao, Mali. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Scott Sayare and Steven Erlanger from Paris.

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