Occupy Wall Street icons: Where are they now?

Few features of Occupy Wall Street were as widely loved as its library, and few were so unambivalently mourned when the eviction came on November 15, 2011. A tremendous police raid, complete with helicopters and riot gear, swept through Zuccotti Park in the early-morning hours, with officers swinging clubs at objects as well as people, clearing the way for  sanitation workers to demolish the rest. Gone were many of the 5,000-plus cataloged books. Gone was the canopy tent donated by Patti Smith. Gone was the closest thing to a quiet place in the Occupy village.

Melissa Gira Grant’s account of the Occupy Wall Street People’s Library, Take This Book, begins, “No one founded the library. The library founded itself”—a quotation from librarian Jaime Taylor. Books began to appear on the northeast corner of the park on the first or second day, and the collection grew each day after that, as if by spontaneous generation. Soon, self-published authors and assistants at prominent imprints alike were dropping off their wares in hopes of having them seen by the new radical elite. Librarians, professional and otherwise, took on the job of organizing the books on shelves, in boxes, wherever they would fit.

Occupy is often thought of as a digital movement born of a hashtag and promulgated in news feeds. But Occupiers treasured their physical books, as they did their print newspapers, colorful posters and abundant handbills. (The business that most directly emerged from the occupation was a worker-owned print shop.) In April 2013, a lawsuit filed by Occupy Wall Street resulted in a settlement requiring the city and Zuccotti Park’s owner to pay $366,700. Of this, $47,000 was for the damage and destruction of books, computers and a bicycle-powered generator during the eviction raid. 

For a while, Robert Carlson’s photograph was everywhere: a man in his 20s, outside Zuccotti Park with close-cropped red hair and steady eyes and a dollar bill taped to his mouth. Some days, the bill had “#Occupy” written on it. He was on the cover of The Economist. He appeared in newspapers across the country. People other places started copying him, donning the dollar bill too. His work of living sculpture depicted perhaps more forcefully and succinctly than any other the message beneath Occupy’s apparent messagelessness: people before profits; money out of politics; banks got bailed out, we got sold out. All slogans fall short of the image.

“He wasn’t telling anyone what to do,” says fellow Occupier Eve Silber, who remembers talking with Carlson during Occupy’s heyday. “It was just a visual statement.”

Despite being one of the movement’s most recognized faces, Carlson was not as deeply involved in the organizing as others. But Silber remembers him as friendly, intelligent, even wise.  “He was one of the people I enjoyed talking to who wasn’t batshit crazy.”

Carlson declined to be interviewed. According to Facebook, he’s back in his native Minnesota. “He isn’t involved with Occupy anymore,” explains Eric Ao, an Occupier who knew him in the park. “Actually a lot of good people don’t want to associate themselves to the Occupy name anymore.”

In the black-and-white photo at the top of his Facebook page, Carlson has that same stolid, steady gaze as he did in the papers two years ago — without the dollar bill.

Many people aren’t aware that on June 14, 2011, before Adbusters’ initial call to “#occupywallstreet,” there was an attempt to mount an occupation in Zuccotti Park. It was hatched by A99, a subgroup of the ostensibly leaderless, decentralized hive of pranksters, activists and hackers known as Anonymous. Only a handful of people actually showed up that day, but a few of them would return three months later for the successful occupation that began on September 17.

In the intervening months, Anonymous produced an ominous, 57-second video supporting the #occupywallstreet idea. Anonymous’ signature Guy Fawkes masks were worn by an ever-present minority at Occupy encampments around the world, but it was never more than one group among many. Anonymous also made threats against financial institutions that compelled the Department of Homeland Security, on September 2, to issue a warning about the September 17 protest and a dangerous new cyber-weapon called #RefRef that could cause havoc on Wall Street servers. But #RefRef, along with several other threatened Anonymous attacks, never materialized.

Since 2011, Anonymous has continued to evolve. It helped draw attention to a case of rape in Steubenville, Ohio, that had been inadequately investigated by local authorities. In the fall of 2012, Anons attacked Israeli government websites to protest a military assault on the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, escalating repression by law enforcement has made such activity ever more dangerous. Alleged Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond, for instance, faces as much as a decade in jail for penetrating the servers of the private security outfit Stratfor.Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, a leading authority on Anonymous, says, “I think they are hibernating right now.” But she has seen this happen before, only to be followed by a resurgence. “Their waxing and waning is very powerful, strategically that is, even if it is totally accidental.”

Ray Leone, now 27, was part of the Direct Action Working Group in OWS, planning protests and civil disobedience, but lately what keeps her busy is community organizing. “I haven’t been as focused on direct action,” Leone says, “though I’m definitely practicing my climb skills.”

After Occupy’s long-anticipated, less-than-hoped-for attempt to mount a general strike on May Day in 2012, Leone left New York. From there, she set off on the trail of eco-actions taking place across the country that summer: first, the anti-fracking blockade at a mobile-home park in central Pennsylvania, then the nearby Earth First! gathering that shut down a fracking well, followed by the Mountain Mobilization against mining in West Virginia, where she was arrested. Finally, she landed for nine months in her hometown of Philadelphia, to rest and earn some money by working at a café.

In July, Leone left the city again and moved into an Airstream trailer on a farm in northeastern Pennsylvania. She is living there with a group of other activists to create a base camp for the movement against natural-gas drilling as it spreads across the Marcellus Shale region. (Even the land they’re living on is leased by an energy company.) They’re reaching out to people in surrounding communities, designing training programs and planning actions.

“The fossil-fuel industry definitely thinks long term,” she says, and her group is trying to do that, too.

Frances Goldin went to the protests at Wall Street on November 17, 2011, to get arrested. Eighty-seven years old at the time, she’d been arrested nine times already in her life and intended to reach 12 before she died. Whatever she did, though, she couldn’t get the police officers to arrest her. A man near her was tackled by police and taken away. She stood where he had stood and threatened to hit an officer and kick him in the groin, but he still wouldn’t cuff her.

Goldin is a literary agent who, without ever having gone to college, has represented best-selling authors like Barbara Kingsolver and the author of Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown. Having become radicalized early on by her husband, a communist, Goldin specializes in working with leftist luminaries like Frances Fox Piven and Mumia Abu-Jamal. She also has an FBI file.

“You know what gave me a totally new life?” she says. “Occupy.”Goldin started visiting the occupation just a few days in, when she brought a crate of oranges. “I’m a Jewish mother, so I believe in feeding people.”

Goldin has been organizing to protect affordable housing in Manhattan since the days of Robert Moses, and she’s still going to meetings.  There is a small, hand-made sign that she used to take to Occupy events, which now says, “I’m 89 and mad as hell.” Each year, as she gets older, Goldin tapes a new number over the old one.

“I never thought I’d live this long. I’m grateful that I can still kick a little ass every day.”

By the time OWS was two weeks old, an unusual number of the occupation’s residents had become minor celebrities. People you’d see in the media center or at the General Assembly meetings became sought-after guests on TV talk shows. The old-guard activist elite greeted them as the new wonder children and flew them across the country for all-expenses-paid strategizing retreats. Hero Vincent, a New York City native, was among the most visible early on. He reaped some degree of fame, but this also helped make him a target, it seems, for the police. In all, Vincent was arrested eight times because of Occupy.

“Everything that happened turned the tables on my perception,” he says. Seeing the inside of so many jail cells and being beaten by so many police shocked him into seeing his native New York differently. “There is so much more evil than I’d thought,” he reflects. “It’s so real.”

The last two arrests came after he’d finally had enough and moved to Charlotte, N.C., where his family was living. On May Day 2012, police apprehended him while he was riding his bike home from martial-arts practice. A few days later, the same officers arrested him again. When his mother called the police to ask why, she was told he had been making threats on behalf of Occupy — which Vincent denies.

“I was kind of done, really,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking of anything other than getting back on my feet.”

Vincent, now 23, works as a personal trainer in Charlotte. He talks about his desire to help people find inspiration in life, about the epidemic of obesity and about his crusade against the mind control of the fast-food industry. Healthier bodies will lead to a healthier society, he believes, and the confidence won in a fight for a slimmer waistline can eventually lead people to build power in the streets.

His plan is to stay put for a few years and then move out of the country. He might go to Korea, he says, so he has been teaching himself Korean over the past few years from books and movies. One thing is for sure: He won’t be going back to New York. “I couldn’t be in that environment again. It’s a constant reminder,” he says. “When you’ve seen so much it’s hard to see things the same way.”

This arrest for civil disobedience on Dec. 17, 2011, was not Paul Mayer’s first brush with trouble, nor was it his last. As a child, and a Jew, he escaped Nazi Germany with his family before World War II. He grew up to become a Catholic priest, a Benedictine monk, a husband, a father, a yoga teacher and a participant in just about every social-justice movement since he left his monastery to march with Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Ala. Fidel Castro once embraced him on Cuban television.

He would be arrested on Occupy’s first anniversary, exactly 10 months after the incident in the photo, for kneeling in prayer at the entrance to Wall Street. But on the day of his court date for that arrest, Mayer had to undergo surgery for what would be diagnosed as brain cancer. He’d fallen sick after spending a cold day with Occupy’s Hurricane Sandy relief effort on Staten Island.

“It was Occupy-connected,” he says, “not that I blame Occupy by any means.”

Now 82, Mayer is undergoing holistic treatment, living a monastic existence again in his apartment in East Orange, N.J. He’s almost penniless, but donations have been arriving from friends and strangers around the world to help pay his bills. A Reiki expert detected an especially strong “wall of prayer” around him, and he believes it: “I’m sure the Creator arranged this illness so I could move more deeply into the spiritual life.”