HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity stepped in on Wednesday to offer counties and early education programs $500 million in low-interest loans to hold them over until a final state budget deal is complete, sidestepping the General Assembly and Gov. Josh Shapiro as they near the start of a third month at an impasse.
Garrity, a Republican who last month announced her bid to challenge Shapiro in next year’s gubernatorial election, announced the unprecedented move to allow the state Treasury to offer the loans to county human service departmentsfor the many social services they provide, as well as for early education Head Start programs, at a 4.5% interest rate.
Counties, schools, and social service providers have pleaded for months with the legislature to finalize a budget so they can begin receiving their expected state payments, which have been on hold since the beginning of the fiscal year on July 1. Some counties have had to secure private loans to hold them over until state payments begin, while others — including those around the Philadelphia region — have relied on their reserves. Other counties have frozen hiring and spending as they await a resolution to the budget stalemate.
The move would allow counties to access millions of dollars for early education programs serving 35,000 children across the state, as well as for county social services — all of which have been operating for months without their state appropriation, with no end to the budget impasse in sight.
Garrity’s decision to act unilaterally without the action of the General Assembly allows her to capitalize politically on the ongoing budget crisis over Shapiro, challenging his image as a moderate Democratic governor of a politically “purple” state willing to work across the aisle in a divided legislature. That brand, which he has built nationally as he is rumored to have interest in running for president in 2028, has been tested as he has so far been unable to secure a budget deal or a recurring funding stream for the state’s beleaguered mass transit agencies, including SEPTA.
Shapiro, for his part, has described his role in budget negotiations as being a go-between for Senate Republicans and House Democrats, who control their respective chambers, and has said that the two caucuses remain “diametrically opposed” on some issues.
A spokesperson for Shapiro said in a statement Wednesday that the real solution to the budget impasse is for Senate Republicans, whose leaders endorsed Garrity last week, to return to work in Harrisburg to finalize a budget deal with House Democrats. A spokesperson for House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) echoed the sentiment, arguing that Senate Republicans “refuse to negotiate on a realistic budget agreement.”
Gov. Josh Shapiro visits SEPTA headquarters Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025 to discuss funding for the transit agency and to pressure Senate Republicans as planned service cuts are pending because of a budget shortfall. To his right, from left, are state Democratic legislators Sen. Anthony H. Williams; Sen. Nikil Saval; Rep. Ed Neilson; and Rep. Jordan Harris.
Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana), the Senate’s top negotiator, who has met for months in closed-door budget talks with Bradford and Shapiro, said in a statement that it was Democrats who caused the prolonged impasse while demanding they include mass transit funding in the state budget. After mounting pressure as SEPTA enacted major service cuts, Shapiro ultimately sought to fund the agency on his own, and the issue will need to be revisited in two years.
Garrity, who kicked off her “Help Is on the Way” introductory campaign tour around the state earlier this week, said Wednesday her decision to intervene in the state budget stalemate was not political, despite her burgeoning run against Shapiro. Rather, she said that she had been thinking about a way to do so for months, including ahead of her announcement of her run for governor, and that most Pennsylvanians don’t even realize the state budget is late. She argued that if she wanted to be political, she would not intervene and would “keep the pressure” on Shapiro over the late state budget.
“I’m standing up here as Pennsylvania’s state treasurer, not as a candidate for governor,” Garrity said from a podium in the Harrisburg building that houses the state Treasury. “I think I have a responsibility to serve Pennsylvanians, that if I have something that I can do to provide some relief, then I should do it.”
However, that didn’t stop Garrity from inviting Montgomery County Commissioner Tom DiBello — the lone Republican on the board where Shapiro once served — to the podium at the news conference to deliver some direct criticisms of Shapiro and to praise Garrity’s intervention as a “lifeline” for counties, alongside two other GOP county commissioners from south-central Pennsylvania. While Montgomery County remains one of the wealthiest counties in the state, the late budget has required Pennsylvania’s third-most-populous county to spend down its reserves, money that it usually relies upon to continue earning interest as part of its annual revenue, DiBello said.
Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy L. Garrity gives her acceptance speech after receiving the PA GOP’s endorsement for her campaign for governor during the Republican Party of Pennsylvania’s 2025 Fall Meeting at the Penn Stater Hotel & Conference Center in State College on Sept. 20.
“It starts at the top. The governor is responsible,” DiBello said. “He’s got to pull it together. It’s his signature at the end of the day.”
In response to Garrity’s announcement Wednesday, Montgomery County Commissioners Neil Makhija and Jamila Winder, both Democrats, said in a statement that the county needs a final state budget instead of a short-term loan program, urging Senate Republicans to “do their job.”
“A short-term loan at 4.5% interest is the state profiting from a problem of their own making, at the expense of the taxpayers,” the two commissioners added.
DiBello said he did not believe his invitation to Wednesday’s event had political motivations, adding: “I didn’t even think of that.” He also noted that he has come to Harrisburg to advocate on behalf of counties multiple times before.
Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland), who has been one of Shapiro’s biggest critics since his first budget in 2023 and was quick to support Garrity’s candidacy, prodded at Shapiro’s pledge to “get stuff done” while praising Garrity’s leadership.
“Today, Treasurer Stacy Garrity made a bold move that shows what ‘get stuff done’ actually looks like,” Ward said in a statement. “Treasurer Garrity’s leadership is on display as her solution-driven option is exactly what we need, but has been glaringly missing from the present administration.”
Garrity said at the news conference Wednesday that she offered the loan program specifically to Head Start programs and county governments’ human service departments because both had asked her to help them get through the budget impasse. The state budget was due by July 1, and Pennsylvania is the only state besides Michigan that has not yet passed its budget. She said she is willing to offer similar loans to schools or other state-subsidized or funded programs as requested.
The Pennsylvania General Assembly can forgive the interest accrued by counties taking out loans during the budget impasse, Garrity said, adding that shewould support legislation that does so.
This suburban content is produced with support from the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project donors. Gifts to support The Inquirer’s high-impact journalism can be made at inquirer.com/donate. A list of Lenfest Institute donors can be found at lenfestinstitute.org/supporters.
Too many people in this country think free speech comes with no consequences. A constitutionally protected free pass to say whatever you want with zero repercussions. But that’s not true. There is a cost to speaking out.
On the left, think Colin Kaepernick being blackballed by the NFL for taking a knee during the national anthem. On the right, think every yahoo who’s ever been fired from their job over some racist/sexist Facebook post.
If you think that’s an unfair comparison, write about it. Yell at me about it. That’s how free speech works. I say something, and you can say something back. How it definitely does not work is when the government steps in. The courts have been very clear that the First Amendment protects us from government censorship.
That means calls to boycott comedian Tony Hinchcliffe after he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at a Donald Trump rally? Legal. ABC firing comedian Bill Maher for insensitive comments after 9/11? Legal. However much you or I can loathe so-called cancel culture, it’s legal.
What happened to Jimmy Kimmel is something else.
On Wednesday, Disney-owned ABC put the late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! on indefinite hiatus. This happened soon after Nexstar Communications Group said it would pull the program from its 23 ABC-affiliated stations over a joke Kimmel had made Monday about the MAGA reaction to the killing of Charlie Kirk. The leaders of the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group also announced they would be preempting the show.
So far, so wrong, but within these private companies’ rights. The problem is that also on Wednesday, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, went on the right-wing podcast The Benny Show and laid out how the government could go after those who gave the late-night comedian his platform.
“There’s calls for Kimmel to be fired. You can certainly see a path forward for suspension over this. And again, the FCC is going to have remedies that we could look at,” Carr told host Benny Johnson. “Disney needs to see some change here, but the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up.”
Now, the FCC cannot go after ABC because, like the other national networks, it does not hold a broadcast license to transmit over the public airwaves (although Disney owns a few stations), but it can absolutely go after local affiliates.
Not only that, but much like in the case of CBS’s cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — which put the Trump-mocking show on the chopping block after the network’s parent company needed government approval for a merger — Nexstar is also in merger talks.
Brendan Carr, then a Federal Communications Commission commissioner, speaks during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, in 2020.
With The Late Show, CBS executives could at least make the case (transparent as it was) that their decision was justified because ratings were down, and they would allow the show to run until the end of the host’s contract next year.
But for Kimmel, there hasn’t been even an attempt at that kind of pretense. He’s been suspended following a barely veiled threat by the guy in charge of allowing TV stations to do business. Now, I think what Nexstar did is cowardly, but it is by no means nonsensical.
Add it to the list of companies, universities, and law firms that have sold out American principles and are fully on board with endangering democracy by enabling Trump’s worst instincts — all for the sake of doing business.
Also, add this incident to the long list of examples of hypocrisy from the Trump administration and the right-wing commentariat. Unsurprisingly, back in 2023, Carr posted on X that “Free speech is the counterweight — it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” The same day Kimmel was suspended, Trump criticized England’s laws limiting speech (he’s right) while praising ABC’s decision.
The president has repeatedly threatened networks over their news coverage, and raged against late-night comedians like Kimmel and Colbert for making fun of him. Of the Big Three networks (sorry, kids, I’m old), Comcast-owned NBC has so far stood its ground.
This is important because Saturday Night Live alone has produced some definitive presidential portraits that have stood the test of time. In my late-night TV-watching lifetime, we’ve seen George H.W. Bush as awkward and out of touch (Dana Carvey), Bill Clinton as hungry horndog (Phil Hartman), George W. Bush as clueless bro (Will Ferrell), Barack Obama as professorial but cool (Jay Pharoah), and Donald Trump as game cue card reader desperate for love and attention (Donald J. Trump).
The show may want to amend Trump’s portrayal, though, to a thin-skinned demagogue who lost his sense of humor about the same time he found love and attention among the vilest peddlers of right-wing vitriol and hate on his way to authoritarianism.
As to what those of us who consider free speech one of the vital ingredients in the American Experiment can do, well, that’s easy.
Speak out, loudly and often — ideally respectfully, but the Constitution doesn’t say you need to be nice. What’s happening is not right, and we need to say so. Damn the consequences.
Crozer Health’s shutteredTaylor Hospital in Ridley Park will be soldto a group of local healthcare executives for $1 million, according to an agreement filed Friday in bankruptcy court proceedings for its owner, California-based Prospect Medical Holdings.
The buyer is a partnership led by Delaware County business owner Todd Strine. The group’s goal is to refill the empty property with medical services, Strine said.
“The ideal thing that could happen is we reopen an emergency room, because that’s what Delaware County needs,” said Strine, who is the majority owner of medical transport company Keystone Quality Transport.
Prospect closed Taylor in late April after the failure ofa state-led effort to find a new operator that would return the Crozer health system to nonprofit ownership. Shortly thereafter, Crozer-Chester Medical Center also closed.
Crozer was Delaware County’s largest healthcare system and a provider of critical safety-net services.For-profitProspect had previouslyclosed Springfield Hospital and Delaware County Memorial Hospital in 2022.
“It’s a fact that Delaware County is less safe today than it was when these hospitals were operating,” Strine said.
He said it seems unlikely that a full-blown hospital would return to Taylor.
Ridley Park Council president Dane Collins said he’s hopeful that an emergency department and doctors services will return to the site. “It’s no secret. The area’s in desperate need of it,” he said.
As part of the agreement, Delaware County, Ridley Park Borough, and the Ridley School District agreed to reduce the taxable value of the property from its assessed value of $60 million to a fair market value of $1 million for the next two years.
The reduced value slashes the amount of property taxes that can be earned on the property for the next two years. However, beginning in 2027, the taxing authorities would be permitted to appeal the value of the building.
The decision to reduce the building’s value so dramatically in tax rolls was opposed by some members of Ridley School District’s board of education, which only narrowly approved the measure on a 5 to 4 vote last week.
Prospect hasn’t paid property taxes on the property since 2022, according to public records.
Delaware County councilmember Christine Reuther called the new value a “tough pill to swallow” in an interview. The property was worth more than the “fire sale price” it had gone for, she said.
The building would be worth less than many homes on the county’s tax rolls, Reuther noted, at a time when property values and home costs are increasing.
She called the resolution yet another example of the negative fallout from Prospect’s abandonment of healthcare resources in the community.
“There’s literally nothing we can do that isn’t going to resolve in a worse result, and that’s wrong,” Reuther said.
Strine acknowledged that the price seems cheap, but noted the building is empty, and it’s a special-use building, making it harder to find tenants. “There’s a ton of carrying costs and a lot of uncertainty about how long it’s going to take to fill up,” he said.
The investment needed to bring the building back to life is going to be many times the price, Stine said.
“It’s positive movement to have an experienced local businessperson purchase the property instead of allowing the property to become abandoned,” said Frances Sheehan, president of the Foundation for Delaware County, whose mission is promoting health and welfare in the county.
Taylor is the second shuttered Crozer hospital to be sold in less than a month. Upper Darby School District bought the former Delaware County Memorial Hospital for $600,000 on Aug. 14. It plans to use the property for expansion of its neighboring high school.
In both cases, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stacey Jernigan said Prospect could abandon the properties, which means that local authorities would have had to put the real estate up for a tax sale.
Prospect had told the judge that the top offers it had received were $1.25 million for Delaware County Memorial, which closed in 2022, and $575,000 for Taylor.
Given the risk of abandonment by Prospect, county and local authorities riskeda totalloss to tax rolls ifProspect abandoned the property entirely.
Robert Strauss, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies property tax, noted that the buyers may have backed out of a deal if they couldn’t obtain the reductions in property taxes.
“It’s hard to envision anything easy happening in the short run that would bring it back onto the tax rolls and be profitable,” he said. “The reduction in revenues seems to me to be inevitable in the next couple of years, regardless.”
This suburban content is produced with support from the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project donors. Gifts to support The Inquirer’s high-impact journalism can be made at inquirer.com/donate. A list of Lenfest Institute donors can be found at lenfestinstitute.org/supporters.
As Vladimir Putin blocks peace talks, Kyiv wants to share with the U.S. and Europe how to counter the AI-driven weapons of the future.
Betsyk, commander for the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade's special battalion for intercepting enemy drones, sits beside downed Russian reconnaissance drones.3rd Separate Assault Brigade
DIRECTION POKROVSK, Ukraine — In a warren of rooms filled with computers, 3D printers, colorful wires, and drone frames, the atmosphere was casual, but the intentions were deadly.
The young men in their 20s and 30s, dressed in cargo pants and T-shirts, wouldn’t have looked out of place at a Silicon Valley start-up. Except they were fighting for their lives — and their country’s survival.
In the basement command center, three of the soldier-techies stared at multiple screens with dozens of views delivered by Ukrainian-made surveillance drones. They were looking for Russian targets in a war that had lasted for three and a half years.
As I peered over their shoulders during a June visit to the rear of the front lines, a moving car was spotted.
Orders were quickly passed to a frontline drone navigator and pilot in a trench or basement who would make the final call as to whether the target was clearly visible and worth destroying — at which point the pilot’s goggles would let him watch the little exploding drone descend until a flash signaled another kill.
It was a slow day, and everyone’s attention had turned to other screens before I could learn the fate of the car. But there were always more targets to find.
By my side, the 31-year-old commander of an elite drone battalion of the 59th Assault Brigade, call sign Condor, told me there are up to 300 targets a day, which can range from a single fighter in the grass to a moving motorcycle to a small Russian dugout covered with branches or nets.
“The orcs outnumber us, and they don’t care about loss of lives,” Condor said, using the name of the grotesque enemy warriors in the Lord of the Rings series to refer to the Russians. “In this new way of war, infantry and artillery and mortars still matter, but everything is controlled by air. Now, a military is just a way of supporting drones.”
For Ukraine, drones are an essential part of why the country has been able to hold out so long against an army four times its size.
Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI's Critical Threats Project.John Duchneskie/Staff Artist
The technology of unmanned weaponry is advancing at a pace that appears revolutionary — from aerial drones to drones that move by sea, robotic land drones, and long-range drones carrying missiles — all increasingly directed by artificial intelligence.
Sea drones drove Russian ships out of the Black Sea along the Ukrainian coast, and continue to strike at the critical Kerch Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea. In June, Ukrainian security services conducted the amazing Operation Spiderweb, which damaged or destroyed up to 40 Russian warplanes worth billions of dollars, deep inside Russia — all with 117 small drones costing $500 each.
But Russia is catching up. Ukraine needs the funds to massively scale up drone production.
That’s why the most important moment of President Donald Trump’s Monday meeting with Ukraine’s president and top European leaders may have been when Volodymyr Zelensky proposed to share his country’s breakthrough drone technology with the Pentagon.
Kyiv would sell tens of billions of dollars’ worth of advanced Ukrainian-made drones to America, and, in return, would buy double that dollar amount of U.S. weapons systems, financed by Europe. Both countries would then be far better equipped for the challenges of modern conflict.
The success of that proposal could bolster American preparedness for future tech wars, while helping Ukraine survive as a free, sovereign state.
More on Ukraine
Trump’s deference to Putin means only more bloodshed in Ukraine
The president could have used America’s power to force Vladimir Putin to negotiate seriously. Instead, he opened the door to blaming Ukraine for any failed "peace" talks.
Why so? Peace talks are going nowhere. Vladimir Putin has no interest in peace. He thinks he’s winning.
The Russian dictator “has no reason to compromise so long as the president refuses to apply any pressure on Moscow,” as former Russian political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza bluntly told MSNBC. “You cannot make peace by placating Russia.”
Despite the effusive red-carpet welcome Trump gave Putin at their recent Alaska summit, the Russian leader has rejected every one of the president’s proposals to end the war.
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No ceasefire. No strong security guarantees for Kyiv, as the naive White House negotiator Steve Witkoff claimed Putin had accepted. The Kremlin has already rebuffed a possible bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelensky that Trump has been touting.
Peace talks will become plausible only if the U.S. joins Europe in putting maximum pressure on Russia, convincing Putin he can’t win and can’t afford to fight any longer.
But that would require Trump to recognize what the Europeans already know: Ukraine has been able to hold off the Russians until now because it has pioneered a revolutionary new way of warfare — the war of drones.
So Zelensky’s proposal is in both countries’ interests. The U.S. is way behind in small drone production, but it has weapons systems crucial to Ukraine. A swap would signal to Putin that Trump is not a pushover.
If Trump wants to be a peacemaker, he must recognize that the Ukraine war is about far more than real estate. It is a battle over freedom, geopolitics — and who will win the tech wars of the future.
As I was told by former Ukrainian Minister of Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin: “This war started like the Second World War with drones. But it will finish as the First World Drone War.”
A pilot with the elite drone unit for HUR, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s intelligence service, demonstrates drone control.Trudy Rubin/Staff
In the air
My latest Ukraine visit — my fifth since the fighting began in February 2022 — showed me what it means when unmanned drones take over the battlefield.
Last year, I could still visit artillery emplacements and destroyed villages near the front where army units lived, showered outdoors, and ate outdoors. I could drive on roads to and from towns near the Donetsk front line inside the contested parts of the eastern Donbas region that Ukraine still controls. Military vehicles still sped along those roads.
Those days are over.
The 15 kilometers (roughly nine miles) on each side of the front line have become a kill zone where almost nothing moves on land because it is at risk of being hit by the other side’s drones.
The size of the kill zone keeps expanding.
Tanks are sitting ducks. So are medical evacuation vehicles. Indeed, military vehicles of any kind. No longer are the soldiers who man frontline positions or drone pilots rotated every day or two; they stay in place for days because the roads in and out are so risky.
Supplies are brought in and the wounded taken out by unmanned robotic carts, known as land drones. These robots also lay mines, and some are equipped with machine guns or rockets.
As for Ukraine’s cities, Putin is demonstrating how drones can be used as a cheap, terrifying tool of terror against civilians.
During my stay in Kyiv, the nightly Russian barrage of Shaheds — drones designed in Iran and gifted by the thousands to Putin by the ayatollahs — rained down nightly on civilian targets. I was lucky to be in a hotel with a comfortable basement shelter, but my Ukrainian friends and contacts were up each night huddled in their hallways or bathrooms. They still are.
Natalya Dubchek stands next to a minibus destroyed by a Shahed drone. The fire from the explosion torched her home in Odesa, Ukraine.Trudy Rubin / Staff
In Odesa one morning, I visited a neighborhood where a family of three was incinerated when a Shahed sheared off the top floor of their apartment building in a residential neighborhood. I spoke with a woman whose bungalow burned to its concrete walls, and who barely escaped the flames.
Even after my return to the U.S., I have kept the air raid alerts on my iPhone, which can be set to any city or region. My phone buzzes every time Russia launches another swarm of Shaheds (along with cruise and ballistic missiles) against Kyiv. For hours, the alerts go off every 20 minutes.
Each buzz means Ukrainian civilians, including the elderly and mothers with small children, must decide whether to descend to an underground shelter and spend miserable hours or the entire night there.
The Shaheds, which give off a chilling whine as they fly, are now copied and manufactured inside Russia with Tehran’s technical help. They have been made more lethal with the addition of jet engines, which enable them to fly higher and faster and elude countermeasures. They are meant to terrorize, exhaust, and kill civilians in Ukrainian schools, hospitals, markets, and apartment buildings.
The number of Shaheds in the skies has jumped dramatically since Putin concluded that Trump will never be serious about punishing Russia for its refusal to accept a ceasefire or engage in serious peace talks. And they are affecting morale. If the Russian barrage continues, more Ukrainians may try to leave for abroad.
A Ukrainian officer shows a thermobaric charge from a downed Shahed drone in a research laboratory in an undisclosed location in Ukraine in 2024.Efrem Lukatsky
Yet, despite the daily Shahed carnage and recent Russian gains on long stalemated front lines, Moscow is still not winning this war.
A prime reason is that Ukraine’s war of technology has so far enabled Kyiv to hold its defensive line, but not to take back territory.
Former Ukrainian commander in chief, now ambassador to the U.K., Valerii Zaluzhnyi, told a video forum in Kyiv that the only war Ukraine can wage is a “high-tech war of survival” until it destroys Russia’s military and economic ability to keep fighting over the long run.
The bad news is that Russia is learning from Ukraine and receiving large-scale tech aid, components, and ready-made drones not only from Iran, but from its other allies, China and North Korea.
This alliance of dictators is growing stronger, and its members are watching the Ukraine war for lessons in future drone warfare with the West. Think China and Taiwan.
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To shake up the Kremlin, Kyiv needs to vastly scale up its drone production and race to outdo the Russians with innovation, especially interceptors that can destroy Shaheds and fiber-optic drones.
European governments and private companies are entering agreements to jointly produce drones, both in Ukraine and in Europe. They are studying Kyiv’s technological advances, including on the front lines.
Ukraine wants to share its invaluable battle-tested knowledge with Washington, yet Trump still appears hung up on the vain hope that Putin “wants a peace deal,” which he mistakenly believes would entitle him to a Nobel Peace Prize.
So long as he refuses to recognize Kyiv’s importance as a strategic ally, the president undermines not only Ukraine’s security but ours.
A Ukrainian serviceman of 57th motorised brigade controls an FPV drone at the frontline in Kharkiv region, Ukraine in August.Andrii Marienko
Drone expansion
In June 2024, when I first met with then-infantry commander Condor of the 59th Assault Brigade in one of the hottest combat zones in eastern Ukraine, he was struggling to arm his depleted battalion. They were suffering through a terrible “shell hunger,” he told me, after the U.S. Congress had frozen military aid for six months. His men were often reduced to firing one artillery shell for every 10 fired by the Russians.
“Every day of [congressional] delay cost broken lives and deaths,” the former history teacher turned soldier said bitterly, as we sat in a dark, virtually empty cafe in the countryside near Pokrovsk. “So, we had no other choice but to be creative.”
To fend off a brutal Russian adversary with four times their population and massive industrial might, the nation’s techies and grunts turned their front lines and hidden basements into a tech incubator for modern war.
Desperate fighters, like Condor’s unit, were already using simple Chinese-made commercial drones to spy on Russian forces in 2023 and 2024.
Every unit I visited near the front during those years had guys working on benches in abandoned farmhouses or workshops, putting together drones from parts purchased on Amazon with their own salaries, or donated by families, friends, or private charitable foundations.
While Ukraine was well known in peacetime for talented engineers and a deep tech sector, many of those early do-it-yourself builders had no such background, but figured things out as they went.
By the summer of 2024, the men of Condor’s unit had come up with how to turn small commercial or DIY drones into little exploding drones.
Call sign Condor, commander of the UAV Forces Battalion of the 59th Assault Brigade.Trudy Rubin / Staff
“We cut sewage pipes and stuffed them with explosives,” Condor explained. “We did the same with energy drink cans.”
These makeshift mini bombs were then affixed to UAVs, the shorthand for unmanned aerial vehicles, mostly small Chinese DJI MAVIC quadcopters, the kind Americans use to record panoramic overhead views of weddings. The Ukrainians launched them at Russian tanks, artillery positions, and trenches.
“This is the art of war,” Condor said, with a grim smile. “When you have no supplies, you have to innovate.”
The turning point came in 2024, when the U.S.-induced shell hunger spurred a massive expansion of drone use to save Ukraine’s army. The goal was to protect and preserve precious frontline man power in a war in which Russia treats soldiers like cannon fodder — and to do so with weapons far cheaper than what they destroy.
Government and private companies produced two million drones in 2025, and are set to manufacture more than four million next year. They could produce eight million to 10 million, Zelensky has said, if they had enough funds.
Other weaponry still plays an important role, especially air defenses. While drones can hold the defensive line, taking territory still requires infantry. But 80% or more of the Ukrainian strikes on the front line are now made by drones.
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Those early exploding drones have evolved into larger attack drones with bigger payloads, including sea drones that resemble large rowboats filled with electronics and sometimes carrying rockets. Robotic ground drones are now mounted with machine guns, and larger long-distance drones can carry small missiles. All of these drones are unmanned and directed by pilots and navigators using goggles and tablets.
Anything that can be viewed by FPVs — first-person view drones in which pilots wearing special goggles can see exactly what the drone sees — is now vulnerable to drone attacks, including men, artillery, ships, helicopters, and low-flying planes.
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In the process, Ukraine has rewritten the rules of ground, sea, and air conflict.
As the war continues, artificial intelligence is certain to take on more of the piloting responsibilities (although target decisions will still be made by pilots and commanders, for now).
So crucial have drones become to modern warfare that the Ukrainian military has a new branch up and running whose task is coordinating drone warfare, called the Unmanned Systems Forces.
“We are the first country with an unmanned forces command,” I was told by Hanna Gvozdiar, deputy minister for Ukraine’s Ministry for Strategic Industries. She estimated Ukraine now produces 300 different varieties of drones.
Moreover, special drone units within most Ukrainian battalions have become central to every element of the conflict. Not only do many of them design their own drones, but they also provide constant updates to private drone manufacturers so they can stay ahead of Russian defenses.
As for Condor, he moved from commanding infantrymen to leading the UAV Forces Battalion of the same 59th Assault Brigade, one of the top drone units in the country. By the time I saw him in June, he was fighting a totally different war.
A worker inspects a combat drone at Fire Point's secret factory in Ukraine in August.Efrem Lukatsky
Advantage Ukraine
In the “genesis space” of a modern, glass-fronted office building in Kyiv, a group of start-up Ukrainian tech entrepreneurs has come to pitch their products to guests from the European Union — and to anyone who might fund them to scale up.
The program is sponsored by Brave1, a government-supported tech incubator that helps connect drone start-ups with investors and provides seed money for promising new projects.
“We are in a race with the Russian drone ecosystem,” I was told by Artem Moroz, Brave1’s head of international investment. “The Russians don’t need to fundraise for drone production,” he noted, with bitter irony.
“We want to win the war with the help of technology because we can’t compete with man power,” he continued. “Most of the innovation comes from the private sector. We unite 1,500 companies, some in apartments, some operating at a huge scale, providing thousands of drones.”
Before the show-and-tell, I listened to Oleksiy Babenko, one of Ukraine’s best drone producers, make his pitch to foreign investors. Babenko’s company, Vyriy — named for a paradise in pre-Christian Slavic mythology — makes a small FPV drone called Molfar, which can function in swarms and evade Russian electronic jamming.
“Practically every Ukrainian university has a polytech [division] that graduates a lot of talent. We are a technical hub for software development, and young tech entrepreneurs are migrating to the battlefield,” he told the group.
A technician prepares a Shrike drone at the Skyfall military technology company in Ukraine.Andrew Kravchenko
“But this brilliant talent needs investment, domestic or foreign, to scale up production. If we don’t do this, we will die.”
After Babenko came the young entrepreneurs with slide decks and videos: Bravo Dynamics promotes a radio-based mesh network that can connect drones, but could also have civilian uses. Farsight Vision produces software that digests visual data, which could help drone targeting or serve business uses. VMP has a robot model “that will be the main tool for logistics on the front line,” but could be used for civil defense.
There is both pride and a sense of frustration in the room. Ukraine is a start-up nation. These talented innovators, not Ukrainian government bureaucrats, have sparked the drone revolution.
Right now, Ukraine produces 94% of its own drones and is reducing its dependence on Chinese parts. Kyiv is also manufacturing 40% of its other weapons inventory.
But Ukrainian factories are operating at only one-fourth of capacity, according to Kamyshin, the former government minister. “We need $10 billion to $15 billion of necessary capital to produce what is needed,” he told me as we fast-walked through a park near his office so he could work off some of the daily tension. “We are much better innovators than the Russians, but we need to scale up.”
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Private Ukrainian firms lead Europe and the U.S. in producing battle-tested drones, from mass-produced FPVs to highly secret deep strike missile drones. Ukraine seeks not only to intensively scale up its own drone production but to become an international hub for dual-use technology.
However, unlike Russia, which can draw on billions from its (dwindling) sovereign wealth fund, Ukrainians must raise funds to increase government and private drone production to keep up with Russian drone output — which has now expanded to industrial scale.
“Our only chance is to become our own arsenal and the arsenal for Europe,” argued former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk over coffee. “The question is, how to organize that.”
European governments are seriously addressing this question of scaling up Ukrainian production, and some private investors are hovering. The question is whether they can act quickly enough to fund joint projects inside Ukraine or based in Europe. Especially now that Trump has decreed Washington will no longer give military aid to Kyiv, but will let Europeans buy weapons to transfer.
There’s no time to waste, as Russia is scaling up its drone output at a frightening rate.
In this photo taken from a video distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service in May, Russian servicemen train to operate military drones in an undisclosed location.Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
Advantage Russia
Putin has rallied Russia’s entire state-run industrial machine behind the war effort, and the total drone output of its state-run industrial machine now exceeds Ukraine’s. Long-range drone production more than doubled from 2023 to 2025, and has increased fivefold since then.
Prodded by Ukraine’s success in drone technology, Moscow is rushing to build a drone empire, even introducing school curriculums about the development and operations of drones.
Moreover, while Russia receives support from its ever-tightening alliance with China, North Korea, and Iran, Trump is too transactional to see the broader geopolitical threat this drone quartet poses to the United States.
Tehran was the first to partner with Moscow by sending thousands of its long-range Shaheds to Russia in 2022. Since then, Shaheds have become the go-to UAV for terrorizing Ukrainian cities.
Iran also helped Russia set up its own production facilities in Tatarstan (now spread out over the whole country), which mass-produce the killer drones, along with decoy copies to confuse Ukrainian air defenses.
In this photo taken from a video distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service in August, a soldier launches a reconnaissance drone in an undisclosed location in Ukraine.Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
Equally dangerous, Russia is giving North Korea the technology and production skills to start producing the Russian variants of Iran’s Shaheds, according to Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov. This will enable the North to strike targets across South Korea, changing the balance of power between the two nations, Budanov warned in an interview with the military news site the War Zone.
Meantime, China, despite its denials, is actively enabling Russia’s drone production, providing basic drones and many critical components. “China uses Russia as a research base,” I was told by Yehor Cherniev, deputy chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s National Security Committee. “China watches aspects of the new warfare. It is about geopolitical vision on both sides.”
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Without Beijing’s aid, Russia would probably be unable to rapidly scale up its production of long-range UAVs.
Moreover, top experts on Russia and China warn that the quartets’ mutual interest in undermining the West should shatter any Trump illusions of splitting Russia from China.
Trump’s coddling of Putin only speeds Russia’s advancement in the new global drone wars, which could boomerang against Washington all too soon.
“The U.S. will be drawn in,” insisted former defense minister Zagorodnyuk. “China and Russia want to destroy Western dominance, starting with Europe and NATO, and leading to a clash with the United States.
“This war is not going to end, but is going to get worse.”
Prime Minister of Denmark Mette Frederiksen lays a wreath during a memorial ceremony, as her husband Bo Tengberg and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, right, stand behind her at the Field of Mars at Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, Ukraine, in 2024.Mads Claus Rasmussen
What Europe understands
On Aug. 3, as Denmark took over the rotating European Union presidency, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called on Europeans to “change our mindset” about helping Kyiv.
“Instead of thinking we are delivering weapons to Ukraine,” she stated bluntly, “we have to think of it as a part of rearming ourselves — because right now it is the army of Ukraine that is protecting Europe. I see no signs that Putin’s imperial dreams stop with Ukraine.”
The tough-minded Frederiksen, who stood up to Trump when he threatened to seize Greenland, is now echoed by most other European leaders, none of whom harbor illusions about Putin’s aims. They understand that Ukraine’s army is defending the line between Western democracies and Eurasian adversaries, as Europe’s NATO members struggle to beef up their weak defenses.
Russia has been conducting assassinations, sabotage, and cyberwarfare against European nations for the past several years. The Kremlin clearly seeks to militarize and control the Arctic, which impacts the Nordic states, and to exert its power in the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic.
The three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — along with other European nations that suffered under Soviet domination, all worry that Putin’s first move should Ukraine fall would be to move on them, perhaps using drones.
The aim would be to prove NATO was a paper tiger and would not come to its members’ defense, leading to the collapse of the alliance.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, left, shakes hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during their briefing in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday.Efrem Lukatsky
Mark Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister and current secretary-general of NATO, has gone one step further, warning that “Russia is reconstituting itself at an incredible pace, and the U.S. is not secure if the Atlantic, Europe, and the Arctic are not secured.”
Rutte has also cautioned that if China’s Xi Jinping attacks Taiwan, the Chinese leader might ask Putin to open a new front in Europe to distract NATO and the United States.
With Trump favoring Putin, the Europeans are moving to bolster Kyiv’s military production, including drones. They know they need Ukraine’s army as a buffer against Moscow. As Zelensky said at the Munich Security Conference in Germany in February, referring to the Russians: “Right now, Ukraine stops them. If not, who will stop them?”
Good question.
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Europe is far from ready to defend against drones or other Russian mischief now that the United States has turned its back. “The Europeans are really changing. They are buying time for themselves,” said Zagarodnyuk. “They realize they will be next.”
With that in mind, Frederiksen has pioneered the “Danish model,” a framework whereby Europeans fund drone production by private Ukrainian manufacturers, with Copenhagen vetting the contracts and effectiveness.
Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Britain, and the European Union are following suit, as is a special fund set up by NATO. Private European weapons manufacturers are looking into joint production and sending representatives to Ukraine to test drones and components. Ukraine, meanwhile, has offered its front line for companies to “Test in Ukraine.”
Ukrainian drone units near the front line tell me they often host European military or civilian manufacturers looking to test drones or components. Few Americans come, they said, and U.S. special forces no longer visit. If Europe coordinates its efforts, that may suffice to fund Ukraine’s drone scale-up and block Russia’s push to dominate drone warfare.
But that goal will be Herculean if Trump continues to back Putin over Europe and Ukraine.
President Donald Trump meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House on Aug. 18 in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)Julia Demaree Nikhinson
What Trump doesn’t understand
Last fall, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt sounded the alarm over America’s lack of readiness for the wars of the future.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, the two men warned: “Future wars will no longer be about who can mass the most people or field the best jets, ships and tanks. Instead, they will be dominated by increasingly autonomous weapons systems (largely drones) and powerful algorithms. Unfortunately, this is a future for which the United States remains unprepared.”
Five days after Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb garnered huge international publicity, Trump signed an executive order calling for “continued American development, commercialization and export of drones.” He called for American “drone dominance.”
What the president did not do was turn to Ukraine, which has extensive combat experience with drones that the U.S. military and its nascent drone manufacturers lack.
To understand whether that makes sense, I turned to Michael Horowitz, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, who served in the Biden administration as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development and emerging capabilities. Translated, that means he is an expert on the new drone warfare, where large masses of relatively cheap unmanned drones can deliver precise and deadly strikes.
“The Ukraine war has been transformative to the U.S. military in a couple of ways,” he told me. “It showed how attack drones are now a ubiquitous part of warfare, and ready to scale up today.”
A Ukrainian serviceman operates a drone on the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine in 2024.Andriy Andriyenko
While the Pentagon has used thousands of drones against militants such as the Yemeni Houthis, the new warfare will demand millions, which “requires the U.S. to find a different model than the war on terrorism … drawing from the lessons from Ukraine,” Horowitz said.
There is another lesson at hand. The Pentagon is a slow-moving bureaucracy that normally deals with only a handful of defense contractors that take years to produce small numbers of very expensive ships, tanks, and planes — most (not all) of which are now vulnerable to cheap drones.
Moreover, the U.S. military structure generally emphasizes a rigid top-down command when it comes to weapons, which can make change difficult.
Ukraine, out of necessity, has cast aside this inflexible model, as small military units now do critical drone R&D and modify drones daily to adjust to changes in battlefield conditions. Moreover, private drone firms and their brilliant techies interact directly with the military and test on the battlefront.
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These are lessons yet to be absorbed by a Pentagon roiled by internal politics and reluctant to commit sufficient funds to scaling up small, inexpensive drones and robots that will be at the forefront of new wars.
Yet, lo and behold, a U.S. change agent has entered the picture.
Schmidt, the former Google CEO, has signed an agreement in Denmark with the Ukrainian government to produce hundreds of thousands of AI-enhanced drones this year, and more next year — particularly the desperately needed Shahed interceptors.
Schmidt’s secretive firm, Swift Beat, has already been supplying Ukraine with drones that have downed many Shaheds. Ukraine will have priority on the interceptors, which will be sold at cost.
This major project by a big name like Schmidt may give other U.S. drone firms — and even U.S. investment funds — the needed encouragement to take advantage of the talent and testing opportunities in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, Trump’s blindness to Putin’s motives will probably deter the U.S. military from making use of Ukrainian expertise in confronting Russia’s strategic army of drones. If he rejects cooperation with Ukraine and Europe — including giving a thumbs-down to any form of Zelensky’s proposed drone deal — it will help Russia surge ahead of the U.S. in drone dominance.
Should this course remain unchanged, sooner rather than later, Americans, Europeans, and Ukraine will pay a very high price.
Dozens of former students of the Paul Green School of Rock Music, most long out of touch, have reconnected to talk about their past. They had rock and roll childhoods most kids could only dream about. The epic road trips and European tours. The performances with rock stars like Eddie Vedder and Billy Idol.
But the alumni of the lauded former Philadelphia musical education program are not simply reminiscing about the music. They are coming to terms with the physical, psychological, and emotional abuse they say Paul Green subjected them to while they were children.
Their conversations revolve around a report Air Mail magazine published in May about Green, a former punk rocker who styled himself a brash tastemaker, and the school he founded in 1998. Based on interviews with more than 60 former students, the story described how Green often flew into violent rages, struck students, and fostered a sexually charged environment for his teenage students.
Although Green did not respond to the allegations in the Air Mail story at the time, he announced through a spokesperson soon after that he would not join his students on a summer tour in the U.S. and Europe.
Since, two dozen of Green’s former students and staff members have spoken with The Inquirer to share additional allegations of misconduct. They include a woman who said Green initiated frequent sexual contact that lasted nearly two years with her in 2007, when she was his 17-year-old student.
It is the first time Green, who was the vulgar and volatile subject of a 2005 documentary Rock School, has been publicly accused of having sex with a student enrolled at his school.
Green declined to be interviewed for this story. After The Inquirer emailed Green this week with a list of allegations it would be reporting, Green responded Thursday and denied having sexual relations with anyone underage or who had been a student at the time. He added that he will close his current children’s music academies, including one in Roxborough, and will retire from teaching.
Paul Green and his charges at the Paul Green School of Rock Music in 2005.
Green said in a statement Thursday, “I want to be very clear, however, that some of the more serious allegations being made, particularly those that are sexual in nature, are not accurate. I have never shown students pornography, and while I admit to extramarital relationships with women connected to School of Rock, I have never had a romantic or sexual relationship with anyone under legal age or anyone who was a current student, during that time frame, or ever. I also deny any sexual harassment.”
The age of consent in Pennsylvania is 16, but sexual contact by a person in a recognized position of trust or authority — such as a teacher or school administrator — with someone under 18 is considered a third-degree felony punishable by up to seven years in prison. This was the law in 2007, and it remains the same today.
The woman, who The Inquirer agreed not to name because of the nature of the claims, said Green first began flirting with her when she was 15, with “inappropriate jokes or comments about my appearance.”
As she got older, it escalated.
“Then, winking, touching, hugging,” the woman said. “He would put his hand on my leg and see how high he could go before I stopped him.”
She was a member of the All Stars, the most talented musicians who toured as a band and performed at professional venues and festivals. She said that during her junior year in high school, when she was 17, Green invited her to meet him for sex at a hotel near the former Race Street school, asking if she was going to “chicken out” before texting her his room number.
The ongoing sexual contact that began that day lasted for almost two years, only ending after the woman graduated and moved away, she said.
During their time together, the woman said, Green sometimes provided her with marijuana, Champagne, or cocaine. He rented porn for them to watch and attempted to arrange a threesome with a former student working at the school, she said.
He would joke, “You’re my teenage mistress,” she said.
Two of Green’s former students and two formerstaffers told The Inquirer they had known that Green was engaged in sexual conduct with the woman while she was his student and after graduation. Two of them said Green himself had told them at the time about the sexual contact — both of whom asked not to be named for fear that it could affect their current employment. One former staffer said Green and the student had been intimate on a European tour bus, under a blanket, while chaperones sat rows ahead.
That staffer said they were afraid at the time to speak out against Green, who ruled the school he created like a self-proclaimed “Überlord.” But staying silent is a regret they’ve carried for nearly two decades.
“I didn’t protect her at all,” the former staffer lamented.
‘Total manipulation’
Many of the 60-plus students who described Green’s physical, verbal, and inappropriate behavior to Air Mail, a weekly news and culture newsletter launched in 2019 by alums of the New York Times and Vanity Fair, are now connected in a WhatsApp group. After an Inquirer reporter contacted the former students, they responded with an open letter to explain why they had decided to continue speaking out.
“We entered his programs with trust and hope, but too many of us left with wounds and trauma we’re still working to heal. Some of us have never played music again.”
And despite bonds of life-forming musical experiences, many of them told The Inquirer they went their separate ways after graduation, hoping to forget the pain.
Former Paul Green School of Rock students Emilia Richman (left) and Carolyn Satlow at Dickinson Square Park on July 7.
“It was total manipulation,” said Carolyn Satlow, 37, an All Star who attended the Downingtown branch of the Paul Green School of Rock Music from 2004 to 2006, and is now chief of staff of the Vetri restaurant group. “This web of secrets that kept us all silent.”
Satlow had turned 18 and graduated from rock school when Green began a monthslong sexual relationship with her in 2007. At the time, she was working at the school as an administrator.
Now married with two children, Satlow said Green also told her about his sexual contact with the then-teenage student.
“I thought this adult person was the authority in the room,” she said of Green. “We all trusted him. I was an insecure teenager and Paul knew that and preyed on it.”
Satlow says being able to talk about what happened, and reconnect with other students who went through similar experiences, has been healing.
“We found lives for ourselves, and we’ve become successful in music and outside of music, and just being great human beings,” Satlow said. “Because we’re all just actively trying not to be him.”
‘Paul being Paul’
By constantly discussing his own sex life and the sex lives of students, who were mostly 12 to 18 years old, Green created an environment where even his most outrageous behavior could be normalized, former students and staffers said.
Jen Bowles, an administrator at the school from 2005 to 2007, told The Inquirer that Green had sent her texts asking if she would have sex with him if he booked a fancy hotel, like the Rittenhouse Hotel or the Sofitel Philadelphia at Rittenhouse Square.
Serious about her job at the school, which she initially saw as an empowering, punk rock space for young musicians to express themselves, Bowles, who was then 24, said she had tried to ignore Green’s messages as inappropriate jokes.
Former Paul Green School of Rock students Allie Hauptman and Aaron Sheehan at Rowhouse Grocery in Philadelphia on June 30.
Bowles, who now lives in Vancouver after earning a doctorate in public health from Drexel University, recalls attending a postshow work dinner Green arranged in 2007 at the former Abbaye bar and restaurant in Northern Liberties. Bowles had hoped the dinner would be an opportunity to discuss a potential promotion to manage the Philly school.
After they had just ordered dinner, she said, Green asked her to have sex with him.
“‘It’s finally happening,’” she recalls Green saying, adding that he assumed that they would have sex.
When she rejected his proposition, she said, Green berated her over dinner, referring to her as a “tease,” shouting that he would find a way to fire her. During his tirade, Bowles said, Green told her that her rejection didn’t matter. He had other options for sex, including students, staff, and sex workers, she recalls him saying.
Bowles said Green then bragged about his sexual conduct with former students and staff he had taught since childhood.
“I wait till they’re 18,” Bowles recalls him saying.
Bowles said she did not report back to work the following Monday and resigned within a week.
“I was broken at this point,” Bowles said. “I thought my future was crumbling into a million pieces, and I learned that the young people I cared about were in the hands of a horrible person.”
Bowles’ longtime friend, Ruth Scullion, recalls Bowles telling her about the experience with Green shortly after it happened in 2007.
“She had told me about the culture at the school — and that she felt preyed on,” Scullion. “She told me about going out to dinner with Paul for what she thought was a work dinner, and how he started being overtly sexual with her and propositioning her. She said when she refused, he said, ‘Well, you’re too old for me anyway.’ It still gives me chills thinking about it.”
Julia Rainer, 37, a former All Star guitarist who now lives in South Philly and works as a therapist, also recalled Bowles detailing the incident to her at the time.
Paul Green School of Rock Music emails shared with The Inquirer show that two months later, Green strategized with a staffer on how best to attack Bowles’ credibility if she filed a sexual harassment lawsuit. By then, the circumstances surrounding the popular employee’s departure had started to spread among staff, even as Bowles decided against pursuing legal action.
Green wrote to the staffer in 2007 about the alleged advances, saying of himself, “Once again: Paul being Paul.” Then later adding, “Here is EXACTLY what I need from you: keep your ears way to the ground, do what damage control you can do.”
‘Always part of rock school’
For many former students, the nearly two years since the Air Mail reporter’s initial contacts have included painful revelations to family members, therapists, and each other.
Last year, people who had long avoided reckoning with their past at the Paul Green School of Rock Music began to reconnect on Zoom.
A.Z. Madonna, 32, a former All Star, who originally grew up in Maplewood, N.J., and now writes about classical music for the Boston Globe, said for years she had distanced herself from her rock school friends.
“I didn’t want to be reminded of how Paul made me feel, which was that I was a failure who deserved to fail,” she said to The Inquirer.
But Madonna is now part of the private WhatsApp group chat, where for months the 60 former students shared stories about their experience at the Paul Green School of Rock Music. Some still talk daily, offering messages of support to friends picking up their instruments again.
There have been park meetups and coffee shop get-togethers. In May, a bunch of the former students attended a Metallica and Limp Bizkit concert, the latter a band they say Green would have berated them for listening to as kids, always emphasizing the classics.
“It’s been very healing,” said Emilia Richman, 33, a South Philly musician and former All Star who now works as a mental health administrator. “So many of us had stayed away from each other because of our shame.”
While some former students said Green’s school unlocked opportunities, they also said that he taught them through fear and humiliation.
Allie Hauptman, 38, who attended the Philly school from 1998 to 2005, and is a founding partner of Rowhouse Grocery, a boutique corner store in South Philly, said she would often turn down the volume on her keyboard all the way so that Green wouldn’t be able to hear any possible mistakes so she was “in the clear from the yelling and swearing.”
Rainer recently played her first show after returning to music in the months after the Air Mail story published.
“The culture of humiliating you, bullying you, isolating you — that was always part of rock school,” she said.
So was Green’s controlling behavior, the students said.
“He really became addicted to that power and control he had over all of us,” said Gina Randazzo, 40, of Collingswood, who began guitar lessons with Green in 1999, was an All Star, and eventually worked at Studio House, a now-closed recording studio for students and young people in suburban New York that Green opened in 2010. “It was almost like he couldn’t help himself.”
The former students say they are not after revenge.
“This is about ensuring that no child is ever again put in a position where they are vulnerable to this kind of manipulation, control, and abuse,” they said in their letter. “While he has released a statement closing PGRA and retiring from teaching ‘in this capacity,’ our primary concern is that PG is never again placed in a position of power over children.”
In their open letter against Green, the 60 former students spoke directly to his most-recent students.
“We hope you are safe,” they said.
That’s something Aaron Sheehan, 33, an All Star from 2007 to 2009 and member of Studio House, tried to tell the students himself when he chanced upon Green’s new pupils jamming to Yes at a South Philly street festival three years ago.
Walking toward the music, he decided to confront Green for telling him he was no good until he finally believed it.
But Green hadn’t come. Sheehan tried telling the parents, but they brushed him away. He must’ve had a bad experience, they told him. They love Paul.
It was hard watching the kids play.
“It was like looking at us all over again,” he said.
‘I was an overgrown teenager’
In 2009, Green sold the company he had formed out of his living room to an investment fund in a deal worth $10 million. In 2023, the School of Rock, which now includes 500 schools worldwide, was purchased by Youth Enrichment Brands, a leading youth activities platform.
Stacey Ryan, the current School of Rock president, stressed that the institution has had no affiliation with Green for over 15 years.
“Student safety is our highest priority, and our mission has always been to provide an empowering space where young people can grow — not just as musicians, but as individuals,” she said.
As part of the 2009 deal, Green retained leadership of the All Stars program, but left within a year after a final meltdown with students, when Green allegedly mocked a student’s Catholic faith, threw a metal chair, and referred to Mother Teresa with a vulgar term for a woman’s vagina, said Sam Mercurio, a South Philly musician and former All Star from 2007 to 2010.
“By the end, he had made it all feel so normal,” said Mercurio, who told The Inquirer Green once whipped him with a mic cable during a rehearsal.
After living in Woodstock, N.Y., for a time, Green returned to Philadelphia in 2017, opening up a new venture, the Roxborough-based Paul Green Rock Academy. The academy, which also has locations in Connecticut and the Bay Area, offered students the same chances to tour and jam with musicians, like the former Zappa band members, that the original rock school kids did 20 years ago.
Shortly after the Air Mail article, the academy’s social media went dormant. Scott Thunes, the academy’s longtime assistant musical director and former Frank Zappa bassist, would be in charge of tours and the entire program, according to a spokesperson at the time. Green said that the school would be renamed the Thunes Institute for Musical Excellence.
In late June, the North Philly performance space PhilaMOCA canceled the students’ scheduled performance of “We Love Zappa.” A spokesperson for the venue said that Green’s continued involvement with the school, along with a push from a former student, led them to shut the show down. Thunes said the cancellation only hurt the students.
Despite his statement, when reached by The Inquirer on Monday, Green was with the Thunes Institute students on an August European tour, alongside Gibby Haynes, the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers and a longtime collaborator with Green’s schools. Videos show him in the front row.
In a statement to The Inquirer, Green said he was stepping in for Thunes, who had to leave citing a “personal issue” halfway through the tour. “The students worked so hard and had already experienced so much turbulence heading into the tour, so we weighed the backlash of me attending versus the fallout of canceling,” Green said. “The current parents unanimously requested that I return to ensure a smooth transition until we could implement a suitable replacement.”
Green, who graduated from Temple University Beasley School of Law in 2021, said he did not speak out sooner about the Air Mail allegations because, “I have been reflecting on that time period, gathering my thoughts, and trying to find the right words. I have been balancing how to genuinely apologize and take accountability for my actions from over 15 years ago, while also unambiguously denying the allegations of things that never occurred.”
Long open about his battle with addiction, he had his own dysfunctional childhood — he grew up fatherless in Port Richmond, joined the Philly punk scene by 13, lived on his own by 15, and formed the original school when his music career failed. Green said drug rehab and years of therapy and meditation have helped him grow.
“I started School of Rock in my living room because I love teaching music, and I wanted to create a fun and intensive atmosphere for students,” he said in his statement to The Inquirer. “I had no idea that it would be successful, and I was not at all prepared for that success at such a young age. I was an overgrown teenager when those students needed a responsible adult. That said, despite how it may appear, my inappropriate behavior or language never came from a place of predatory intent as has been insinuated.”
He added that closing the schools “was not an easy decision, as teaching music has been my life’s work and greatest passion. But I believe this is the right moment to close this chapter with gratitude and integrity.”
‘Nobody does what Paul Green does’
Ten parents, who contacted The Inquirer through a spokesperson for the Paul Green Rock Academy, said they never witnessed Green cross a line. None of the children ever told them he did, they said.
“I have seen countless rehearsals and performances in the last seven years,” said one parent, whose child is a longtime student at the academy. “I’ve never witnessed any of those alleged behaviors, nor has my child ever reported inappropriate conduct.”
When speaking to The Inquirer, the parents, whose children are current or former students of the Paul Green Rock Academy, were only responding to the questions about the allegations already published by Air Mail. The Inquirer did not make them aware of the new sexual allegations detailed in this story.
Though Green, in his statement, says he’s changed, parents of current students at the Rock Academy tell The Inquirer that Green didn’t run from his bad boy image.
While assuring them he’s mellowed, he still makes it part of his selling point — and a new generation of parents believe him.
“Paul’s teaching style was addressed right from the very beginning,” said one parent, whose daughter graduated from the academy, in a statement provided to The Inquirer through a school spokesperson after a reporter had contacted the academy about Green. “In my mind there was no question that we all knew what we were signing up for.”
One parent said Green recommended that families considering the Paul Green Rock Academy watch Rock School, which shows him berating and humiliating students busy mastering some of the most complicated rock compositions ever written. In the film, Green also presents a student who described being suicidal with an award for “most likely to kill himself.”
Green can still be “arrogant,” “rude,” and “foulmouthed,” the parents said. He sometimes still screams and storms out of rehearsals, they said. One parent said she had met with Green for throwing a rattle shaker at her child, but that they had moved past it.
The parent, who stressed she did not want to dismiss the former students’ experiences, credits Green’s “grittier” and “edgier” approach for helping her son, who is neurodiverse, flourish socially and musically.
His current students appear heavily devoted. On Instagram, they praise classic rock and quote Zappa. They take each other to prom and form bands. They post tour updates and photos from past performances, where Green could often be seen in the front row.
Green addressed the allegations months ago, they said, removed himself from rehearsals, and met with parents individually.
“Paul’s a pretty open guy — and I was aware that there was stuff in the past he wasn’t proud of,” said one parent, whose two sons are Rock Academy grads. “But I can certainly say this: Nobody does what Paul Green does. No rock school does what the Paul Green Rock Academy does. Nobody offers that experience.”
‘Like Whiplash’
But some of the most successful musicians to emerge from the Paul Green School of Rock Music say nothing was worth the verbal and emotional abuse they experienced from Green.
Eric Slick, 38, a former All Star and now drummer of the Philly-formed rock band Dr. Dog, was also featured in the Air Mail story. A drumming prodigy who grew up in Fairmount — his grandfather was a jazz trombonist who played with Billie Holiday — he had been bullied for his weight at the Masterman School before hoping he found a sanctuary at rock school in 1998.
His talent only made him more of a target with Green. Like on his 12th birthday, when Green suddenly exploded in rage over his Pink Floyd drum solo, spitting, cursing, throwing mics, and kicking amplifiers.
Eric Slick, drummer for the rock band Dr. Dog, says he was bullied by the Paul Green School of Rock Music founder.
“It’s this Whiplash moment where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not safe here,’” said Slick, who now lives in Nashville, referring to the 2014 film about a young jazz drummer and his explosive teacher.
At his birthday dinner with his parents at Spaghetti Warehouse after practice, Slick said nothing.
“We were these misfit toys who didn’t fit in, who weren’t jocks, who weren’t popular. And then suddenly we have this opportunity to jam and grow as musicians together,” he said. Talking, he thought as a kid, would jeopardize that.
“I would be out of this friend group, and I would be done,” Slick said.
It’s a sentiment shared by many former students.
“I feel like I really shut down,” said Lauren Cohen, 37, of Doylestown, an All Star from 2002 to 2005, and a classical musician who performs regularly in Philadelphia. “I feel like I shoved my emotions down and everything that was telling me, “This isn’t safe.” I kept ignoring it because I made friends.”
The bullying from Green grew constant, according to Slick. About his weight, his appearance, his high school sex life.
“I remember stuffing down all of these extreme sad feelings I was having after the rehearsals,” he said. “You just realized that every facet of your life is manipulated in order for him to get what he wants, which is to sell schools.”
He’s shared stories of the school with his current bandmates. “That’s not normal,” they tell him.
Even now, while playing to tens of thousands, Slick finds himself looking stage left, where Green stood so long judging his every drum groove and fill, set to erupt.
“The fear of his wrath still haunts me,” Slick said.
Kaleen Reading, a drummer with the band Mannequin Pussy, performing at the World Cafe Live in 2024.
Kaleen Reading, 33, an All Star from 2006 to 2009 and drummer for the Philly-based punk band Mannequin Pussy, said Green also often denigrated her about her weight, and left her fearful of pushing the tempo during performances to this day.
In May, shortly after the Air Mail article was published, Reading announced she would not travel with her group on a series of European summer tour dates. At the time, Reading wrote on Instagram that her absence was due to “mental health concerns” — and that the move was necessary for the “longevity of me remaining in the music industry.”
Reading later told The Inquirer she needed the time to process her own memories of the Paul Green School of Rock Music, including verbal abuse.
“Paul Green is not a teacher,” she said. “He is an abuser who can get results from yelling at already talented kids he selected to advertise his school.”
‘Just a child’
Sitting in a car outside her home before work on a gray morning in July,the former student who said Green began ongoing sexual contact with her when she was 17 said she saw Green as more than a teacher. At the time, Green represented the only real adult male figure in her life. Familiar with her battles with depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder, Green encouraged her dreams of becoming a professional guitarist, she said.
“I would have done anything for his approval,” the woman said.
At 17, she and Green would meet at a hotel blocks from the former Race Street school. Or Green would pick her up a short distance away, so no one would see, and drive to a roadside, budget motel with pirate and Hawaiian-themed rooms called the Feather Nest Inn just over the Ben Franklin Bridge. On tour, Green would sometimes sneak her into his room, she said.
The woman tried burying the memories of her experience with Green, but struggled with ongoing depression and feelings of inadequacy. She said she suffered a nervous breakdown “for weeks” last year, after she was first contacted by the Air Mail reporter. Although not ready to speak publicly at the time, the query forced a reckoning.
“If I hadn’t been forced to confront it, I was prepared to bury it forever,” she said.
Instead, with the help of a therapist, the woman began to grapple with what she said Green had put her through when she was underage.
“I let it all out,” said the woman.
She, too, has found strength in her old friends from rock school, whose friendship she packed away with the trauma. For years, she said could not enjoy the experience of music without memories of Green. She’s just now playing again.
“I always thought it was my fault,” she continued. “Still, I have to remind myself that I was just a child.”
Ty Murchison rubbed out Jack Nesbitt along the wall during a drill on the first day of Flyers development camp last month
The 2021 fifth-rounder, who is 6-foot-2 and 205 pounds, made sure he did it with noticeable authority. And not just because he was taking out Nesbitt, the 6-5 and 185-pound center who was drafted 12th overall four days before.
Murchison’s game is predicated upon his size and physicality, and he has quietly developed into a left-shot prospect on defense whom the organization is watching closely.
“He’s a late-round pick, but maybe he just has a little bit longer of a runway to get to where he’s going,” Flyers director of player development Riley Armstrong told The Inquirer in April. “And I think when you do a rebuild, you can’t just sit back, in my mind, can’t just sit there and be like, OK, we’re only going to focus on our high-end picks.
“You have to go in there and say we’ve got to focus on the fifth, the sixth. … And I really do think that just because you’re a sixth-, seventh-round pick, or not even drafted … if you work your butt off, and you do the little stuff, you never know what can happen.”
Murchison, now 22, did that.
Murchison wrapped up his four-year career at Arizona State last season as the National Collegiate Hockey Conference’s defensive defenseman of the year. Skating against schools like Western Michigan — and Alex Bump — and national semifinalist Denver, which the Sun Devils finished ahead of in the standings, the assistant captain snagged the award after blocking 98 shots.
Those 98 blocks were a program record and also led all NCHC players. He recorded seven against Bump’s Broncos, two shy of the career high he set against Boston University as a sophomore.
“He’s great,” ASU teammate and Calgary Flames draft pick Cullen Potter told The Inquirer at the NHL scouting combine. “He puts his body out there for the team, in any way he can, blocking shots. … So he’s just a great team guy, and I love having him around the rink, keeps it light, and has some fun with it, which I think hockey should be.”
The Flyers selected Ty Murchison, who played collegiately for Arizona State, in the fifth round of the 2021 NHL draft.
Ready to roll(er)
Maybe it’s the California vibes that help him keep it light. Maybe it’s that Murchison, who will play with Lehigh Valley of the American Hockey League this season, wasn’t twirling around rinks as a wee tyke.
Correction: Ice hockey rinks.
“I played roller hockey, pretty much since I could walk. I had no intentions of really getting into ice hockey until I was probably like 14, just for fun,” Murchison said in April. “But I got a coach from ice hockey who kind of saw me play roller and asked me to join their team. That’s how I got into it, and kind of just took off from there. But, yeah, roller hockey is really my roots, for sure.”
Murchison’s parents moved to California from Canada so his father, Ken, could play in the Roller Hockey International, a professional inline hockey league that ran from 1993 to 1999. Ken Murchison, who played at the University of New Brunswick and in the East Coast Hockey League, also worked for the Anaheim Ducks and managed inline rinks around the state.
Ty Murchison didn’t swap his wheels for blades until he was 11.
“The adjustment was really the edges and the skating. I couldn’t stop when I first started playing,” the younger Murchison said with a big laugh. “So that’s kind of how I got my physical aspect. I was blowing kids up because I couldn’t stop. I was just running into kids.”
After doing “a ton of skating lessons,” Murchison began to excel, and at 16, he moved to Michigan to join the U.S. National Team Development Program. But roller hockey was never far from his mind, and while at Arizona State, he and his dog Penny would rollerblade around Tempe Town Lake.
Ty Murchison grew up playing roller hockey in California.
NHL prospects?
Murchison’s skating has drastically improved through the years, and “he’s physical, keeps it simple,” and is “in your face.” He also does “all the little things that you need guys like that to do when you want to go far,” as noted by former Phantoms coach and current Flyers hockey operations adviser Ian Laperrière.
Now, Murchison and Armstrong are working on his hands.
“He is a high-end skater, really competitive and physical,” Armstrong said of Murchison, whom he compared to Nick Seeler. “Right now, we’re just working on his puck plays and his decision-making. At the junior level, maybe he runs the power play, and he gets that little bit of confidence on the blue line about doing stuff and things like that; I think it goes a long way.
“So we’re working at that with him right now, and who knows? We’ll see where it goes.”
Ty Murchison participated in the recent Flyers’ development camp.
This summer, Murchison is spending time working on getting stronger and putting on weight because “at the next level, everybody’s strong, and the way I play, I need to be stronger than most guys.”
The blueliner got a taste of what’s to come, skating in four games for the Phantoms in April after the conclusion of his college season.
He’s also working on those hands and upping his offensive game after collecting nine goals and 14 assists in 145 career games for the Sun Devils. And of course, he’s playing roller hockey. Recently, Murchison skated in the North American Roller Hockey championships in California.
But now he has his sights set on bigger goals.
“I’m very proud of it, it’s been a blessing,” Murchison said of playing pro ice hockey. “I’m happy to be here. It’s what I’ve been dreaming of — even though I played roller hockey — I always dreamed of playing in the NHL when I was a little kid. So, yeah, I’m hoping to take the next step and get there one day.”
On July 18, more than 250 Venezuelan immigrants held since March in a Salvadoran prison at the behest of the Trump administration were released in a prisoner swap for 10 U.S. citizens and permanent residents jailed by the Venezuelan government.
For the men and their families, it could not have been a more joyous moment. It had been months since they last heard from their loved ones, not knowing if they were alive or dead.
For the respective governments involved, it was also a time to crow.
Even self-described “world’s coolest dictator” (and apparently America’s next top jailer), Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, got a little self-love in, boasting on X of the “months of negotiations with a tyrannical regime” that El Salvador had engaged in to help get the Americans home.
Well, bully for authoritarianism.
For the rest of us — for those who believe in the rule of law and still hold out hope for the American Experiment — July 18 may be remembered as a dark day.
Unless the administration is held accountable for the blatantly illegal way it upended these immigrants’ lives, the episode will mark a new low in America’s slide toward illiberal democracy under President Trump.
As prisoners stand looking out from a cell, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, in March.
Undue process
To be sure, the release of all these men is good news. Most of the freed Americans were wrongfully detained and accused of being involved in plots to destabilize Venezuela.
Their arrests were part of a transparent, cynical ploy by the Maduro regime to use these men like bargaining chips as the country struggles to get out from under oil sanctions that have contributed to the nation’s deep economic problems.
The illegal detentions were also par for the course for a government where every branch is controlled by Maduro loyalists, and which routinely jails its own dissidents. (The swap included 80 political prisoners, but there are conflicting reports on whether they have all been released.)
There is no question that Venezuela’s actions are morally and legally indefensible. But what about America’s?
The more than 250 Venezuelans who ended up in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, were sent there by the Trump administration on March 15. They were deported with little or no due process under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, accused of being dangerous criminals and members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump declared a terrorist organization.
But reporting by several media organizations quickly put the lie to those claims, with ProPublica finding the government’s own records show that it knew the vast majority of the men had not been convicted of any violent crime in the U.S., and only a few had committed crimes abroad.
Most of the men were also not very hard to find, as they were either never released from immigration custody while they pursued asylum claims or their cases were moving through the immigration system.
Take the four Venezuelans identified as having ties to Pennsylvania before they were sent to CECOT.
Inmates exercise under the watch of prison guards during a press tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in Tecololuca, El Salvador, Oct. 12, 2023.
Joén Manuel Suárez Fuentes, 23, was detained during a traffic stop and charged with driving without a license. Ileis Villegas Freites, 28, had been sentenced to one year of probation for retail theft in Montgomery County.
Miguel Gregorio Vaamondes Barrios, 32, had a series of shoplifting arrests, including an open theft case in Pennsylvania, and was convicted of petit larceny in Nassau County, N.Y. Luis Jean Pier Gualdrón, 22, had a pending asylum application when he was deported. He had pleaded guilty to harassment in Northampton County, Pa., and was sentenced to three to six months in jail.
While some may argue that only people of unimpeachable moral character should be welcomed in America — and having a criminal record can disqualify immigrants from being granted legal status — these men were far from the “monsters” and members of a gang who the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said “rape, maim, and murder for sport.”
And even if they had been charged with being the worst of the worst, under the Constitution, the government still has to prove its case against anyone it seeks to deprive of “life, liberty, or property.”
In deporting the Venezuelans, the administration acted recklessly and lawlessly, ignoring not only the letter of the law but also directly disregarding an order from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, barring the government from transferring the men to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.
That the men are now free — although it is highly likely some have been placed right back in the dangerous situations under an oppressive regime they were fleeing in the first place — does not absolve the Trump administration of wrongdoing.
Migrants deported months before by the United States to El Salvador under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown arrive at Simon Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetia, Venezuela, July 18, 2025.
Test case
Throughout the entire ordeal, the government has placed itself above the law.
Seeking to make good on Trump’s promise of mass deportations and tall tales of criminal immigrants running rampant, administration officials engaged in the kind of abuse of power that is un-American on its face.
The government selected a group of men under suspect criteria, identifying many of them as gang members based on the discredited belief that they had identifying tattoos. It then disappeared them, sending them to a foreign prison known for its brutal conditions, where they were unable to communicate with their families or lawyers.
To this day, officials have not even released a full list of names of the people they sent to El Salvador. What is publicly available has been cobbled together from families speaking out and media reports. It is unclear if everyone deported has been accounted for.
The government consistently defied court interventions, claiming that once the men were in El Salvador, they had no direct control over what would happen to them. The prisoner swap makes this particular lie only more blatant.
Most alarming is that there is nothing stopping them from doing it again — or keeping them from doing it to whomever they want. Already, Trump has mused about sending Americans to El Salvador.
“The homegrowns are next,” he told Bukele during the Salvadoran leader’s April visit to the White House. “You gotta build about five more places. … It’s not big enough.”
Having already violated the Fifth Amendment guaranteeing due process, it’s not much of a stretch for the administration to ignore the Eighth Amendment’s protection from cruel and unusual punishment.
America cannot move on from what happened to the Venezuelan immigrants. Their plight cannot be swept away in the flood of scandals and outrages that regularly flow from the White House.
The Trump administration cannot be allowed to do this to anyone ever again.
Brady Martin answered the phone last week. Was he at the rink, keeping his legs loose before he is selected in the NHL draft on Friday? Or maybe home, relaxing after a week of interviews and physical tests at the NHL scouting combine?
Nope.
“I’m actually sitting outside an auction right now,” the projected top-10 draft pick said. Yep, Martin was selling some of his cows just days before being drafted.
During the COVID pandemic, the center didn’t have much to do. Martin, the middle son of Sheryl and Terry Martin, and his brothers invested their money in beef cows. He was selling some of his cows on this day.
“We usually buy a cow, and usually have a calf with it,” Martin explained to The Inquirer. “We raise up the baby calf, and then once it’s big enough to sell, we’ll take it to the butcher or the auction, and then someone else will buy it, or we’ll butcher it and keep it for our own meat. Depends on what the price is looking at.”
Raising cows isn’t something new to Martin. Known for his hitting and physical game on the ice, he gets his strength from his family’s dairy farm, helping to raise and maintain 250 cattle, 4,000 pigs, and 60,000 chickens. They have a lot of land — technically two farms — outside of Elmira, Ontario, near the hometown of former Flyer Darryl Sittler, and they grow wheat, corn, beans, ryegrass, and hay to feed their animals before selling the excess.
Brady Martin is planning on taking over the family farm once his hockey career is over.
When the now 18-year-old Martin was younger and not training as much, his days would start at 6 a.m. doing chores for the next 2½ hours before having breakfast. After getting his fill, he’d return to the beef barn for more chores until 10 a.m. Some of his responsibilities included feeding the cows and baby calves, making sure they had dry bedding to lie on, and ensuring the herd was healthy.
During the hockey season, he was part of a co-op and in school part-time. So, he would work most of the day, until about 5:30 p.m., before practice at 7 p.m. “That was kind of my day, and after practice, come home, watch some hockey, and then do it all over again the next day,” he said.
“I’m not working much anymore,” he added. “I’ll get up and still do the chores around 6 before anything. I’ll get up and I’ll do the chores, and then I’ll go work out and skate, and usually have that done by midafternoon. Then I have my day to go back to the barn and do whatever. … Kind of used to working hard and working a full day.”
The work ethic is there
Farming has been part of the Martin family for generations, and he plans on taking over the farm when his hockey days are over. It is this background, as a member of the Mennonite community in Canada, that has helped him build a strong work ethic akin to the blue-collar values of Philly.
And it is at No. 6 that the Flyers could snag this highly touted prospect. This past season, the centerman put up 33 goals and 72 points in 57 regular-season games for the Soo Greyhounds of the Ontario Hockey League. An alternate captain, he had a team-best eight power-play goals before adding another four points (two goals, two assists) in five playoff games. He then went to Texas and put up 11 points (three goals, eight assists) in seven games for the gold-medal winning Canadians at the U18 World Championship.
“It does not take long to find out why scouts love him so much, because he is the hardest hitter in the draft,” FloHockey NHL draft analyst Chris Peters said. “He hurts people because of how hard he hits. He’s not doing it maliciously; he’s just that devastating of a body checker. But then, he can also score, and he’s got hands, he’s got the ability.
“Does he have the offensive upside of some of these other guys that we are talking about, like [Jake] O’Brien, [James] Hagens, [Porter] Martone? Probably not, but he does have that well-rounded capability to be defensive, to make you know that he’s there. There is still a huge value placed on that competitive element of his game. He comes by it naturally, too. Grew up on a farm, raised on a farm. … There’s a work ethic to the kid. There’s a character to the kid. And on top of it, he is this fearsome player.”
Brady Martin has turned into “a wild card” in the 2025 draft, The Athletic’s NHL draft analyst Scott Wheeler says.
When asked about being called a “wrecking ball on skates” by draft analysts, Martin replied quietly and modestly with a “Yeah” and a laugh.
“I love the physical part of the game, and just a big part of my game for sure,” he said. “Yeah, to be offensively skilled and compete and work hard like that, to have that tool in my toolbox is good. To be on a hit, know when to hit, I know I enjoy it, too. So yeah, it’s a big part of my game.”
At 6 feet and 187 pounds, the pivot is “not a behemoth,” as NHL draft analyst Scott Wheeler said at the combine in Buffalo. “But he is probably pound-for-pound, one of the strongest players in this draft, and just an absolute terror.”
That’s a pretty good thing when you compare your game to NHL menaces — but also point producers — Matthew Knies, Tom Wilson, Zach Hyman, and Sam Bennett. The latter was named the Conn Smythe Trophy winner as the playoff MVP while leading the Florida Panthers to their second straight Stanley Cup over Hyman’s Edmonton Oilers, Martin’s favorite team.
Sounds like his work ethic and style would fit perfectly in Philly.
Brady Martin had 33 goals and 72 points in 57 regular-season games for the Soo Greyhounds of the Ontario Hockey League.
“Brady Martin is one of one in this class,” Wheeler said. “He is the most competitive forward in this class. He is arguably the most competitive player in this class. I would say that him and Kashawn Aitcheson are the fiercest competitors in this age group. He is the most physical forward in this class. He hits and hurts guys. He dominates guys physically in terms of just his intensity, the way that he goes after guys, and finishes his checks.
“So there’s that piece of it, which every team loves, the throwback player, and then on top of that, he’s very skilled. He’s got this sort of quick-twitch hands, and he can make plays, and he’s got an NHL shot.”
Martin met with the Flyers and was one of three players known to have had dinner with the team in Buffalo. He said they talked for a while, it was casual and, fittingly, they took him for a steak. Flyers hockey is “kind of the hockey I play, so I think it’d be a perfect fit for me,” he added.
It may be, considering the Flyers are always searching for guys who already come with a “high compete” level. It was the edict under former coach John Tortorella, and it’s fair to say Rick Tocchet leans the same way. And of course, at No. 6, the expectation is that if the Flyers take a center, he’ll be the future linemate of Matvei Michkov.
“I think it would be good,” Martin said of pairing with the Russian star winger. “I think he’s a skilled player, and he’s one of the best players this year on that team. And, yeah, it’d be cool to play with him and, if I get the opportunity, I think it could work, get him pucks, and make room on the ice for him.”
When asked what he loves the most about hockey, the kid who started skating at 3 and “wasn’t very good” when he started said it was “being part of a team” and “when you win at the end, it’s even more fun [because] you get to enjoy the moment with your peers and your teammates who you’ve played all season with.”
Brady Martin is widely considered the top hitter in this year’s draft class.
Who is Brady Martin? He’s a banger with high skill who puts the team above himself. Which is why he will not be in Los Angeles to hear his name called on Friday. He will be home in Ontario, surrounded by family and friends, as his community throws a party, too.
“I could have went to LA, but I really enjoy my family and hockey season playing in the Soo, I don’t really get to see them much,” he said. “So to be at home and experience that with them is what I’ve always wanted to do, and to have a couple of my buddies and my peers on my side, and cousins and stuff, it’ll be pretty special.”
And after celebrating? There will be chores to do in the morning.
As Donald Trump intensifies his push for mass deportations, and communities rightfully protest in defense of their immigrant members, local and state leaders must be ready to stand up and defend the rule of law — including civil rights — against a president who is increasingly bent on using authoritarian tactics.
The United States is a nation of laws, and those who are in the country illegally should understand there are consequences. But two wrongs don’t make a right, and the way the Trump administration has engaged in enforcing immigration has leaned into the kind of cruelty and brutality that is anathema to American values.
During his presidential campaign, Trump was clear that if elected, he would seek to deport the estimated 11 million people in the country without authorization. Thanks to misinformation, propaganda, and the Biden administration’s inability to pursue a coherent asylum strategy, many voters were sold on Trump’s promise of mass deportation as a viable solution to what they saw as a crisis on the border.
The U.S. has every right to control who enters the country, and detaining and deporting immigrants who commit violent offenses has near-universal support. But mass deportation is a morally bankrupt policy whose execution, even if done within the boundaries of the law, results in families and communities being torn apart, to no discernible benefit.
Protesters confront police following an immigration raid protest the night before. Mass deportations tear families and communities apart, to no discernible benefit, the Editorial Board writes.
If the president were serious about ending illegal immigration, he would begin by lobbying Congress to reform a system that is deeply broken and works only for those who seek to exploit people who are looking for a better life in the land of opportunity.
The old saw that immigrants in the country illegally should “get in line” cuts to one of the biggest misconceptions about immigration, and that is that for most people seeking to come to the U.S. legally, or to adjust their status once here, there is no line.
Immigrants toil under difficult conditions in construction, meat processing, and dairy farming. They take care of our children and our elderly, and pick the fruits and vegetables that end up on our tables. They help revitalize blighted and economically depressed commercial corridors with their small businesses. They are also easy to demonize and scapegoat whenever politicians need to find someone to blame.
There is a stunning hypocrisy in the Trump administration’s claim that it is righteously enforcing the law to protect America from immigrants, even as it engages in the kind of lawlessness that truly endangers the union. The government has clearly violated the Constitution, denying due process to immigrants it has accused of serious crimes and summarily deported to foreign prisons renowned for torture.
The president also continues to coyly ignore the courts, endorse U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents hiding their identity and acting like de facto secret police, and flirts with disaster by entangling troops trained for deadly combat in civilian law enforcement surrounding immigration protests.
Those protests are only expected to grow, yet Trump is fanning the flames, extending his dangerous dehumanizing rhetoric from immigrants to those who would defend them. During a speech at Fort Bragg in North Carolina on Tuesday, the president called protesters in Los Angeles “animals” and a “foreign enemy.”
“We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean, and safe again,” he told gathered soldiers, in a deeply troubling display of politicizing the military.
Philadelphia has already been targeted by the administration as a “sanctuary city,” and ICE tactical teams are reportedly on their way. What happens if Trump decides the city also needs to be “liberated”?
While we must all continue to demand thatthe courts and Congress hold the president accountable for any abuses, elected officials must do all they can within the law to protect all Philadelphians — including immigrants.
A government that is allowed to run roughshod over the rights of some will not hesitate to trample the rights of all.
LOS ANGELES — Inside a North Hollywood police precinct late on March 9, 1977, before the cops began questioning her about her father, Carol Steindler noticed a young woman sitting outside an office. The word HOMICIDE was stripped across the room’s pebbled-glass door, but Steindler didn’t think anything of it, didn’t see the straight line linking those three things: the word and the woman and her father. How could she see it? She didn’t know yet that he was dead.
What she did know was that Howie Steindler, 72, the owner of the Main Street Gym and a respected boxing manager, had not come home that night. Her mother, Ann, had telephoned her in a panic. Your daddy still isn’t here. Howie often stopped at his favorite bar, the Redwood, after a long day of work, but something this time made Ann “insanely upset,” Carol said recently, “more upset than usual.” Ann was so unsettled that she also called boxing promoter Don Fraser, Howie’s best friend. Fraser in turn called the police, who told him to get himself and at least one member of the Steindler family to the precinct.
The nature and timing of Howie’s disappearance were strange. Over the previous month, Ann, who tended toward the eccentric, had become convinced that something terrible was going to happen to her husband, telling Carol and others, My Howie’s gonna die. My Howie’s gonna die. Carol had stopped by her parents’ condominium in Encino, Calif., one day in February to find Howie, who had always handled the couple’s finances, teaching Ann how to write checks. “Are you sick?” Carol asked him, fearing that her father might be suffering from a fatal disease. No, he replied. It was just time for Ann to learn.
Those puzzling incidents were piling up while Steindler was approaching what promised to be the apex of his career in boxing. Looming over LA’s skid row neighborhood, the Main Street Gym was an institution, and Steindler was a popular member of the sport’s community, 5-foot-6 and slim but tough, hot-tempered yet softhearted, with few apparent enemies if any at all. He was so well regarded, in fact, that when the cast and crew of a low-budget movie — about an underdog Philadelphia fighter who gets an improbable shot at the heavyweight title — decided to use the gym as a location to shoot several scenes, one of the film’s stars had sought him out.
For two weeks in 1975, Burgess Meredith had shadowed Steindler, observing how he spoke to fighters and ran the gym, soliciting insights and advice from him, so he could better portray Mickey Goldmill, the wise and grouchy trainer who prepares Rocky Balboa to go the distance against Apollo Creed in Rocky. The Academy Awards would be held on March 28, 1977, and among the film’s 10 nominations was Meredith’s, for best actor in a supporting role. If he won, the chances were good that Meredith, in front of millions of viewers on ABC, would thank Steindler in his acceptance speech.
That moment of worldwide recognition for Steindler would never materialize, and not merely because Jason Robards, for playing Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men, won the best supporting actor Oscar that year and Meredith did not. Instead, Howie Steindler’s name would be left, for those who remember it, cloaked in sadness and mystery. Fraser picked up Carol and drove to the police station. The two of them sat together, waiting for an answer about his whereabouts, as the clock ticked toward midnight.
Sylvester Stallone on location while filming the original “Rocky” in Philadelphia.
A troubled heart of gold
Sylvester Stallone was anonymous in Hollywood, with just $106 to his name, before writing the script for Rocky and insisting, at the risk of scuttling the entire project, that he play the titular character. Rocky’s true star, the biggest name in the movie at the time, was Meredith.
He had earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor the previous year for his performance as a salesman/ex-vaudevillian in The Day of the Locust, and his lengthy career as a stage and screen actor, coupled with his deserved reputation as a ladies’ man, had made him a frequent source of copy in newspaper entertainment sections and gossip pages. (“Showgirl is 4th Wife of Burgess Meredith” was the headline of a brief United Press International story in January 1951.)
He was one of 41 actors who either auditioned or was considered for the role of Mickey; Lee J. Cobb, Art Carney, and George Burns were among the others. When producer Bob Chartoff approached him about the part, though, Meredith was skeptical.
“Chartoff came to Dad’s house,” Meredith’s son Jonathan said. “‘Look, we’re making a film about a boxer with Sylvester Stallone, and we’d like you to be in it. We think it’s really going to be a great film, so what we’d like to do is give you a piece of the production and then pay you less.’ And Dad says, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’d rather have the money because no one’s gonna watch a film about a boxer.’ And then, of course, it became a hit.”
Meredith accepted the role for a salary of $20,000, and the Main Street Gym was an obvious choice for Stallone, Chartoff, coproducer Irwin Winkler, and director John Avildsen as an essential location for Rocky, its grimy interior and creaky floors lending Stallone’s training scenes with Meredith an atmosphere fit for any Philly neighborhood.
The gym, on the second floor of an old concrete theater, hovered above a parking garage at the intersection of Third and Main Streets. Its entrance adorned with a sign that read “World Rated Boxers Train Here Daily,” it shared the building with a luggage store. Jim Murray, the renowned Los Angeles Times sports columnist, described the gym’s setting as “losers’ turf, the crossroads of hopelessness and despair, the home base of a lot of guys who have quit in their corners of life.”
It was the perfect place for the hardest men on earth to harden themselves. Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali (when his name was Cassius Clay), Jack Dempsey, Floyd Patterson, Joe Louis, George Foreman: All of them and more trained there. Steindler himself managed Danny Lopez to the World Boxing Council featherweight championship in November 1976 — the same month that Rocky premiered. Lopez’s title fight was held in Ghana, and Steindler, sick at the time, couldn’t accompany him on the trip.
Still, he was so proud of his contribution to Lopez’s championship that he invited several friends and reporters to the Redwood one night, then had them listen to a recording of the radio broadcast of the bout. He’d sip a bottle of brandy immediately after Lopez’s fights to calm his nerves, and having taken over the gym in 1960, he kept a ledger, on a yellow notepad, of all the money he had loaned to fighters — two dollars here, three dollars there, 10 dollars sometimes — and never collected.
“Even with the gruff exterior,” Carol said recently, “he had a heart of gold.”
Jimmy Gambina, who played Mike, Mickey’s assistant, and whose father, Ralph, was an accomplished manager, spent weeks teaching, or trying to teach, Stallone proper boxing technique for the film. “I got him in condition to be a tough guy,” Gambina said, “not a good boxer, just a banger, a Joe Frazier type who weighed less.” Steindler served a different function, simply by being himself. He was Meredith’s model.
Jimmy Gambina, who played Mike, Mickey’s assistant in “Rocky.”
The first time he met Steindler, at the gym, Meredith was dressed in what he called his “broken-down outfit” to play Mickey: ratty sweatshirt, pilled cardigan, cotton balls stuffed in his cheeks, makeup cauliflowering his ears, 17 fake stitches zigzagging near his eyes. He asked Steindler if he could use the phone. The costume fooled Steindler, who told him, You think I’m running a hotel here? There’s a phone down on the street. I got other things to do.
“He thought I was one of the bums, and he gave it to me,” Meredith once told the Los Angeles Times. “Later, when I went out, one of the rather slow-minded pugs around there must’ve got to his ear and said, ‘That’s one of the stars of this thing.’”
Meredith wasn’t much of a boxing fan. Loving the sport required a “love of the brutal,” he once said, that he didn’t possess. But Steindler “gave me the mind of the man,” meaning Mickey. “I’d stay around that office and listen to him crack. He’s quite a fella.”
Rudy Tellez, who apprenticed under Steindler before becoming a longtime trainer and manager himself, said that Meredith and Steindler would sit down for long conversations, and Meredith would watch Steindler’s facial expressions intently: “That’s where he picked up all that dialogue and persona.”
There’s no public record of Steindler ever saying, Women weaken legs or You’re gonna eat lightning, and you’re gonna crap thunder, as Mickey did. But it wouldn’t have been out of character if he had. “He used to call me ‘schmuck’ or ‘putz’ or all other kinds of crazy Jewish names,” Tellez said. “He meant it with love, though.” He kept a wad of cash, as much as $400, on him at all times because he didn’t trust banks. He wore a special 14-karat-gold diamond ring and drove a gold ’76 Cadillac. His office was barely big enough to store a couple of brooms, and he decorated it with photos of chimpanzees with people’s names under them. He refused to list the gym’s phone number because he didn’t want to be bothered with “too many annoying calls.”
Homeless men, their bottles of wine and beer wrapped in paper bags, sometimes slipped inside the foyer and staggered up the staircase, following the aromas of fresh sweat, dried blood, and liniment. On those occasions, Steindler might grab the billy club that hung on one of the walls.
“I run this place, y’see,” he told an LA writer in February 1976; by then, his health deteriorating, he was carrying an oxygen tank with him. “I pay the rent, and this is the most famous gym in the world. Y’might hear remarks that this is a dingy neighborhood, but no gym in the world has a tenth the traffic or a hundredth of the number of fighters.
“Sure, we got troubles sometimes, but it’s nothing. Everybody’s being hit by the same trouble. We got characters floating around — the screwballs find their way up here — but I run a strict place. This is one establishment that stays the way it was established.”
Some of those characters were more dangerous, and some of the potential troubles more serious, than Steindler implied. Crime boss Mickey Cohen, who as a teen had trained at Main Street and fancied himself a budding featherweight contender, was a presence in the LA boxing scene until his death, from complications from stomach cancer surgery, in July 1976. Fraser tried to keep Cohen and the rest of his kind at a distance, according to his daughter Denise.
“Dad would say, ‘Don’t ever have the mob do anything for you because you’ll owe them for the rest of your life,’” she said. But boxing has always been seamy, stained with corruption. There’s no cleaning it. There never has been. All you do is live with it, if you can.
“Ex-gangsters, Mafia, I met a few,” Tellez said. “They’d come up and see Howie.”
Howie Steindler (right), who was Burgess Meredith’s model for the character Mickey in the movie “Rocky,” had a close friendship with promoter Don Fraser.
A critical error
The day of Steindler’s death began in its ordinary way: the click of a key into a lock, the clomping of feet up steps. Tellez had been worried about Steindler for a while, had heard him arguing on the phone frequently. The previous afternoon, in fact, Steindler had called a state senator to talk about problems he was having with the state athletic commission. He had another loud, anxious phone conversation that morning; with whom, Tellez didn’t know. When Steindler hung up the phone, Tellez asked him, Are you OK?
Yeah, schmuck, he mumbled. I’m all right.
Tellez wouldn’t let Steindler lock up the gym alone. They left together that night. He never saw his mentor again.
At the precinct, Carol thought perhaps her father had gotten into an argument or fight with another motorist, a road-rage-style incident, or maybe he had been arrested on DUI charges. The word murder didn’t cross her mind until the police separated her and Fraser and brought her into an office to question her.
“When I got in the room there,” she said, “you would have thought I killed my father. They treated you like that. ‘What time do you get home? What time did your husband get home? Where were you?’ And yet, they haven’t told me anything about my father. Finally, I said to the guy, ‘You’d better’ — and I used some not-so-nice words — ‘tell me what’s going on or I’m not telling you another thing.’”
So they told her: A highway patrol officer had come across Howie’s Cadillac on the shoulder of Ventura Freeway, five miles from the Steindlers’ house. His body was in the backseat, his feet dangling out an open door. He had sustained a horrible beating. Three of his ribs and a vertebra were broken. He had bruises on his head, chest, and right leg and a puncture wound to his right temple. Fraser identified the body to spare Carol the sight. The official cause of death was “suffocation by apparent smothering”; the police speculated that the killers had pushed Steindler’s face into the car-seat cushion.
His wallet, his keys, his identification papers, and his gold diamond ring were missing. There was a dent on the back of Steindler’s car and a hole slicing through the bumper, indications that someone had rear-ended him.
A witness had told police that two men had attacked Steindler as he stood near his Cadillac a block from his home, punching him before shoving him in the back of the car and driving away. At first, the observer had thought the victim was female, because Steindler was so small and slight. The witness drove past the scene once, then again, then left when one of the assailants started to approach her, but she described the men’s car as being older and gray.
The young woman. Carol now understood why the young woman had been sitting near the HOMICIDE door. She was the witness. And she had made one critical mistake: Instead of noticing the license plate of the old, gray car, she remembered the license plate of Steindler’s: HOWIE-5.
Carol Steindler, with former lightweight champion Sean O’Grady, has maintained a close connection to the National Boxing Hall of Fame, which gives out an award in her father’s honor.
‘You never know’
From that beginning, a lack of evidence — and competing theories of the crime — made the case difficult to solve. Marv Engquist, the detective who led the investigation, believed that Steindler had been a random victim, that the killers had collided with his Cadillac to draw him into a confrontation and rob him. The MO fit other unsolved murders in the same vicinity and time frame, and Steindler’s feistiness, his refusal to back down from anyone, could have escalated a robbery into something more deadly.
Carol has long been skeptical of that theory. “The police, the homicide detectives, all thought it was a bump-and-run,” she said, “and I kept saying, ‘No, it’s something else. My father and mother were acting really strange for two weeks.’ I don’t think it’s just a bump-and-run. I think they knew something.”
Gambina and Tellez still believe that the mob was responsible for Steindler’s murder. They raised and discussed that possibility in hushed tones and with measured words. “The fight game,” Gambina said. “You never know what’s going to happen with people.”
Carol took over the Main Street Gym and ran it until 1984, when it was razed to build a parking lot. She and her sister, Bobbi Beatty, would from time to time speak to a newspaper or TV reporter, usually on the anniversary of their father’s death, to reawaken interest in and awareness of the case. But the odds that it will be solved are less than slim. Detectives compiled suspects but never made an arrest. Carol, who lives in Thousand Oaks, Calif., is 86. Bobbi died of cancer in 2004. Those who were involved or might know what happened — even the killers themselves — have either died or aged into inertia.
“Unfortunately,” William Beatty, Bobbi’s widower, said in a phone interview, “it’s like you’re trying to find out if there are any witnesses to the Civil War.”
After 48 years, with so many questions still lingering unanswered and unanswerable, one detail remains especially haunting. Nine months after her husband’s car and body were discovered, Ann Steindler received a strange package in the mail: Howie’s wallet, Howie’s keys, Howie’s credit cards. No cash, no return address, no fingerprints.
True Rice, a Los Angeles transplant from Baltimore, walks by a site where “Rocky” was filmed, coincidentally wearing an appropriate hoodie.
What has changed and what hasn’t
Three hundred parking spots, give or take, cover the piece of land where the Main Street Gym once stood. In some ways, little has changed about the neighborhood. Weeds and tufts of grass burst up from the concrete. Walls and telephone poles are psychedelic with graffiti.
On a recent morning, a man in a red plaid shirt stretched out on a ledge near a palm bush and slept. A few feet away, another man, dressed in ratty black, crouched down, put his hands on the sides of his head, and began screaming. A pair of white sneakers dangled from a wire stretched above, giving the lot a Philadelphian flavor. Around the corner, a dog had dropped something in the middle of the sidewalk that its owner, if the animal even had an owner, hadn’t bothered to scoop up.
There was no historical marker commemorating the gym. No artwork invoking Rocky, Stallone, or Meredith. No acknowledgment of one of the most inspirational films ever made … or the dark story connected to it.
Then, as if by magic, there was something. There was someone. True Rice strolled through the lot, heading back to his apartment after grocery shopping. Twenty-nine and a native of West Baltimore, he moved to Los Angeles in 2020 to try to make it in modeling and music.
“Came out here with 60 dollars in my pocket,” he said, “looking for a change.”
The striking aspect about him wasn’t what he did but what he wore: a white, hooded sweatshirt that he had bought the day before. Plastered across the back were the words “ROCKY: His whole life was a million-to-one shot” and a depiction of Stallone atop the Art Museum steps.
Did Rice have any idea about the history of where was walking and what that history represented? The lot … the gym … the men … the movie … the murder … the stories and the scenes, exhilarating and evil.
He said what anyone would have expected him to say. He said what even those few who remember Howie Steindler and his death would have to admit. He stood in the middle of a grim city block with no memory, and he said he didn’t know.
