Boot Camp Proponent Becomes Focus of Critics
America's Buffalo Soldiers Re-enactors Association
New York Times/August 9, 2001
By Michael Janofsky
Modesto, California -- Distraught over her 17-year-old
son's rebellious attitude and drug use, Rebecca Humble, a single mother from San
Diego, began looking for an outdoor therapy program for him. Finding a magazine
advertisement for the Pacific Coast Academy, she called and reached the
marketing consultant, "Stephen Michaels."
Mr. Michaels, she recalled, told her that her son would
receive proper care as well as stern discipline at the academy's camp on the
South Pacific island of Samoa. Persuaded by his promises, Ms. Humble enrolled
her son, Christopher, in a one- year program for $20,000.
Christopher lasted six months. When he returned home in
December 1999, Ms. Humble said, his weight had dropped to 118 pounds from 165;
he had scars from beatings, and he could barely walk or talk.
Ms. Humble soon learned that Stephen Michaels was really
Stephen A. Cartisano 3rd, one of the best-known figures in the therapy camp
business, an industry that has grown from just a few operations 20 years ago to
several hundred. Many of them, like Pacific Coast, use rugged outdoor settings
to shock teenagers out of bad habits and bad behavior.
But as the programs have grown in number so have
accusations from campers that they have been physically abused, denied food and
medication and placed in the control of counselors who have little or no
training for the special needs of troubled children.
While Mr. Cartisano has never been convicted of a crime, no
one in the therapy camp industry has faced more accusations.
During his 12 years as an owner or employee of programs in
Utah, Hawaii, the Caribbean and now Samoa, he has been the subject of
accusations of abuse or fraud at every camp where he has worked, so often, he
said in an interview here, that he began using aliases "just to stay in business
and feed my family."
At Mr. Cartisano's latest venture, the three-year-old
program in Samoa, which is owned by two Americans, more than a dozen American
children recently complained of physical abuse and 23 of them quit the program.
The father of one teenager said his son was sexually molested by several camp
counselors.
The camp, which is still operating, is being investigated
by Samoan authorities "for a number of allegations of assaults and harsh
treatment of students," said Asi Blakelock, the police commissioner. Some of the
youths were placed in the protective custody of the United States Embassy until
their parents could arrange for them to fly home.
To Mr. Cartisano, 45, a charismatic and articulate father
of four who once studied to become an actor, the accusations relating to the
camp in Samoa, as well as those everywhere else he has worked, are false.
In two recent interviews here, he insisted that every
accusation of abuse had been fueled by manipulative, deceitful youths who
invented stories to escape the rigors of a program that places heavy emphasis on
work details and militaristic discipline.
That includes claims of Christopher Humble, he said,
insisting that Christopher lost weight because he refused to eat and suffered
scars after an accidental fall. In addition, Mr. Cartisano produced an
evaluation sheet that Ms. Humble completed before Christopher was sent to Samoa
in which she described her son as a habitual liar.
He also said that some of the accusations against him were
concocted by venal parents who "simply want refunds" of annual tuition costs
that reach $30,000 and more.
Mr. Cartisano says he firmly believes that he - not the
parents or their children - is the real victim, the result of a long and
vengeful campaign arising out of one fatal event 11 years ago at a program he
ran in southern Utah known as Challenger II: Kristen Chase, a 16-year- old girl
from Florida, died of heatstroke after a long hike.
The authorities in Kane County charged Mr. Cartisano and
the program with two counts of negligent homicide and nine counts of child
abuse. After two trials, the first ending in a mistrial, a jury acquitted him of
all charges.
Nonetheless, Mr. Cartisano said, Kristen's death, combined
with the deaths in Utah of two other teenagers, Michelle Sutton six weeks
earlier and Aaron Bacon in 1994, at programs run by former employees of Mr.
Cartisano "made me a wonderful target" for accusations that have continued for
nearly a decade. "Even though I was acquitted," he said, "people had everything
they needed to start tearing my programs down."
At the very least, the deaths in Utah raised Mr.
Cartisano's profile and alarmed local authorities wherever he went later. Camps
he set up in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands and Costa
Rica were all shut down by the authorities over licensing violations, and
children returned home, claiming they had been physically abused by camp
personnel or that the camps provided inadequate medical treatment.
The authorities in Utah revoked his license to operate in
1990 and despite his acquittal, he was banned from ever working with child
treatment programs in the state. Later in 1990, after officials in Hawaii found
him operating an unlicensed camp on the island of Molokai, a judge barred him
from operating a camp anywhere in Hawaii.
Thomas D. Farrell, the deputy district attorney who sought
the injunction to close the operation, said he interviewed the children who were
removed from the Molokai program, and "every damn one of them," he said, told
officials that camp counselors physically abused them.
In May 1993, the authorities on St. John in the Virgin
Islands discovered Mr. Cartisano running a program without a license and closed
it down. Months later in Costa Rica, two boys told the authorities there they
had been abused and imprisoned in another Cartisano camp.
The next year, Puerto Rican officials found five boys bound
in ropes in the back of a car and learned they had been attending a program run
by Mr. Cartisano and were left there by camp counselors. Charges of child abuse
and operating without a license were filed, but the camp closed before papers
could be served.
