PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

ROMBONGAN BKKBN KECELAKAAN DI SUMSEL

saco-indonesia.com, Dua wartawan yang tengah mengikuti peliputan acara Badan Kependudukan dan Keluarga Berencana Nasional (BKKBN) telah mengalami kecelakaan di persimpangan Betung Kabupaten Banyuasin, Sumatera Selatan. Dua wartawan itu telah mengalami luka-luka setelah mobil yang telah mereka tumpangi disenggol truk pembawa sawit.

Peristiwa kecelakaan itu telah terjadi pada pukul 22.30 WIB malam. Rombongan berangkat dari Musi Rawas menuju Palembang.

Dalam mobil unit penerangan (Mupen) itu ada dua wartawan, yakni Rifa Nadia Nurfuadah dari Okezone.com dan Ira Sasmita dari Republika. Warga yang telah melihat kecelakaan itu langsung membantu mengevakuasi.

Rifa hanya mengalami luka ringan. Sedangkan Ira mengalami luka cukup parah. Korban langsung dilarikan ke Rumah Sakit Caritas untuk bisa mendapatkan perawatan.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

RENTAL MOBIL JAKARTA

Mitra Mobil telah menyediakan kendaraan personal dengan kualitas terbaik. Kami telah menyediakan armada kendaraan yang bersih dan terawat, didukung oleh supir yang berpengalaman sehingga dapat memberikan pelayanan yang memuaskan untuk dapat memenuhi kebutuhan transportasi Anda. Kami juga melakukan service secara berkala untuk setiap kendaraan operasional kami, sehingga resiko kendaraan bermasalah adalah sangat kecil.

Mitra Mobil Car Rent hadir untuk dapat memberikan pelayanan yang berkualitas di bidang jasa sewa mobil murah di Jabodetabek. Kami juga memberikan garansi prima untuk setiap layanan mobil yang akan diberikan kepada setiap pelanggan kami. Mitra Mobil Car Rent menyediakan armada mobil sewa yang Terawat, Bersih, Aman, Nyaman, dengan harga sewa mobil yang murah dan kompetitif. Kami telah memberikan pelayanan yang ramah dan selalu siap membantu pelanggan selama 24 Jam. Kami sangat mengutamakan keselamatan, keamanan, dan kenyamanan  customer dalam memakai jasa kendaraan kami di JAKARTA, BOGOR, DEPOK, TANGERANG dan BEKASI.

Kami menyediakan beragam jenis armada mobil,  baik yang bertransmisi manual maupun bertransmisi automatic. Armada yang kami sediakan mulai dari city car seperti Toyota New Camry, Toyota Yaris, Proton Savvy, sampai dengan mobil keluarga seperti Toyota Alphard, Toyota New Avanza, Toyota Innova, Nissan Grand Livina, Daihatsu Granmax, Daihatsu Xenia, Suzuki APV, Isuzu Elf, dll.

JOKOWI SEBUT MACET DAN BANJIR HAMBAT PEMBANGUNAN JAKARTA

saco-indonesia.com, Gubernur DKI Jakarta Joko Widodo (Jokowi) telah menyebut, macet dan banjir dapat menyebabkan infrastruktur ibu kota terhambat. Namun, dia juga bersama Pemerintah Provinsi (Pemprov) DKI juga akan berupaya untuk dapat membangun Jakarta menuju kota internasional.

"Kita fokus ke situ, progresnya misalnya masuk ke industri-industri yang punya nilai tinggi. Ini juga akan kita pikirkan karena apa, infrastruktur kita terhambat karena macet dan banjir," ujar Jokowi di Balai Kota, Jakarta Pusat.

Menurut mantan wali kota Solo itu, apabila infrastruktur Jakarta akan dapat berjalan dengan baik, dia juga akan memikirkan untuk prestasi ibu kota yang sudah diciptakan. Sebab Jokowi juga menegaskan, dia akan fokus mengatasi macet dan banjir.

"Kalau infrastrukturnya sudah baik semuanya baru kita akan memikirkan prestasi-prestasi lainnya. Kalau belum apa yang harus kita lakukan. Artinya fasilitas kemacetan harus kita atasi, banjirnya bisa diminimalkan," kata Jokowi.

Lebih lanjut, Jokowi juga menambahkan, Pemprov DKI tahun ini telah memulai tahapan baru menuju Kota Jakarta berkelas internasional. "Saya kira kita sudah mulai kok dan ini kita kirim orang ke Taiwan untuk masuk ke manufaktur ke posisi ke atas," terang Jokowi.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

ZAMAN MINANGKABAU

2. Zaman Minangkabau Timur Istilah ini dipinjam dari istilah yang dikemukakan oleh Drs. M. D. Mansoer dkk, dalam bukunya, Sejarah Minangkabau, dikatakannya Minangkabau mengalami dua periode, yaitu periode Minangkabau Timur yang berlangsung antara abad ketujuh sampai kira-kira tahun 1350 dan periode Minangkabau Pagaruyung antara tahun 1347-1809. Dikatakannya, bahwa kerajaan-kerajaan lama, pusat perdagangan lada, pusat perekonomian, politik dan budaya yang pertama timbul dan berkembang di Minangkabau adalah di lembah aliran Batang Hari dan Sungai Dareh. Daerah itu berkembang pada abad ke tujuh sampai pertengahan abad keempat belas. Secara geografis memang pantai timur pulau Sumatera lebih memungkinkan untuk dilayari oleh kapal-kapal dagang yang dapat berlayar sampai masuk jauh kepedalaman. Daerah pantai Sumatera Timur ini pulalah yangdahulu didatangi oleh nenek moyang orang Minangkabau yang berlayar sampai ke daerah Mahat di Kabupaten Lima Puluh Kota sebelah Utara. Pedagang-pedagang Islam yang mula-mula ke Minangkabau juga melalui daerah ini, sehingga perdagangan diwaktu periode Minangkabau ini menjadi sangat ramai sekali, bukan itu saja, Islam pertama pun masuk dari sini, baik yang dibawa oleh pedagang-pedagang dari Arab sendiri, maupun yang dibawa oleh pedagang-pedagang dari Persia, Hindustan, Cina, India dan lain-lain. Pada permulaan abad Masehi perpindahan bangsa-bangsa dari utara ke selatan telah berakhir. Mereka telah menetap di sepanjang pantai kepulauan Nusantara. Setelah mereka menempati kepulauan Nusantara dan hidup secara terpisah, akhirnya karena lingkungan alam kehidupan bahasa yang mereka pergunakan pun mengalami perubahan seperti yang kita kenal sekarang dengan suku-suku bangsa Minangkabau, Jawa, Bugis, Madura, Sunda, Bali dan lain-lain. Pada zaman purbakala, di Asia terdapat dua jalan perdagangan yang ramai antara Barat dan Timur, yaitu melalui darat dan laut, jalan yang melalui darat disebut jalan Sutera, mulai dari daratan Cina melalui Asia Tengah sampai ke Laut Tengah. Perhubungan darat ini sudah mulai semenjak abad kelima sebelum Masehi. Waktu dimulainya perpindahan bangsa Melayu Muda ke arah selatan. Perhubungan darat ini terutama menghubungkan antara Cina dengan Benua Eropah (Romawi) diwaktu itu dibawah raja Iskandar Zulkarnain dan selanjutnya dengan menyinggahi daerah sepanjang perjalanan seperti India, Persia dan lain-lain. Perhubungan laut ialah dari Cina dan Indonesia melalui selat Malaka terus ke Teluk Persia dan Laut Tengah. Perhubungan laut ini menjadi sangat ramai pada awal abad pertama Masehi, karena jalan darat mulai tidak aman lagi. Sejak waktu itulah daerah-daerah di Pantai Timur Sumatera dan Pantai Utara Jawa menjadi daerah perhubungan antara perdagangan Arab, India dan Cina. Keadaan ini memungkinkan pedagang-pedagang Indonesia, termasuk di dalamnya pedagang-pedagang Minangkabau ikut aktif berdagang. Dengan aktifnya pedagang-pedagang Minangkabau dalam perdagangan dengan India, maka terbuka pulalah perhubungan antara kebudayaannya. Dari sini dapat kita lihat masuknya pengaruh Hindu ke Minangkabau melalui daerah pantai timur pulau Sumatera. Dalam abad kedua setelah Indonesia mempunyai perhubungan dengan India dan selama enam abad berturut-turut pengaruh Hindu di Indonesia besar sekali. Jadi karena keadaan, pedagang-pedagang Minangkabau ikut terlibat dalam kancah lalu lintas perdagangan yang ramai di Asia. Keadaan itu pulalah yang menyebabkan Minangkabau di daerah aslinya sendiri yang jauh terletak di pedalaman. Karena selat Malaka sangat ramai dilalui oleh kapal-kapal dagang dari Cina dan India maka salah satu bandar diselat itu bertumbuh dengan pesatnya sehingga akhirnya umbuh menjadi kerajaan Melayu. Kerajaan Melayu ini menurut para ahli berpusat di daerah Jambi yang sekarang dan diperkirakan berdirinya pada awal abad ketujuh Masehi. Nama Melayu pertama kalinya muncul dalam cerita Cina. Dalam buku Tseh Fu-ji Kwei diterangkan bahwa pada tahun 664 dan 665 kerajaan Melayu mengirimkan utusan kenegeri Cina untuk mempersembahkan hasilnya pada raja Cina. Pada waktu itu daerah Minangkabau merupakan daerah penghasil merica yang utama di dunia. Rupanya Minangkabau Timur tidak lama memegang peranan dalam perdagangan di Selat Malaka, kareana sesudah muncul kerajaan Melayu dan kemudian sesudah kerajaan Melayu jatuh di bawah kekuasaan Sriwijaya, Minangkabau Timur menjadi bahagian dari kerajan Sriwijaya. Dengan berdirinya kerajaan Melayu dan kerajaan Sriwijaya kelihatan peranan Minangkabau Timur tidak ada lagi, karena berita-berita dari Cina hanya ada menyebut tentang Melayu dan Sriwijaya saja. Dalam satu buku yang disusun oleh It-Tsing dapat kita ketahui bahwa dalam tahun 690 Masehi, Sriwijaya meluaskan daerah kekuasaannya dan kerajaan Melayu dapat ditaklukannya sebelum tahun 692 Masehi. Kerajaan Sriwijaya merupakan salah satu kerajaan pantai, negara perniagaan dan perdagangan internasional dari Asia Timur ke Asia Barat. Selama lebih kurang enam abad kerajaan Sriwijaya merupakan kerajaan utama di daerah nusantara waktu itu. Namun sementara itu di Jawa mulai timbul kerajaan-kerajaan baru yang lama-kelamaan menjadi saingan utama dari kerajaan Sriwijawa dalam merebut hegemoni perdagangan di wilayah nusantara yang menyebabkan lemahnya Sriwijaya. Dalam hal ini lawan kerajaan Sriwijaya yang utama adalah kerajaan Kediri di Jawa Timur dan Kerajaan Colamandala di India selatan. Dari kelemahan Sriwijaya itu, rupanya kerajaan Melayu dapat melepaskan diri dari Sriwijaya dan dapat memperkuat diri kembali dengan memindahkan ibu kota kerajaan ke daerah hulu Sungai Batang Hari. Kerajaannya dinamakan dengan Darmasraya. Hal ini dapat diketahui dari prasasti Padang Candi tahun 1286 yang terdapat di Sungai Langsat Si Guntur dekat Sungai Dareh dalam Propinsi Sumatera Barat sekarang. Pada tahun 1275, Raja Kertanegara dari kerajaan Singosari (kerajaan yang menggantikan kekuasaan Kediri di Jawa Timur) mengirimkan suatu ekspedisi militer ke Sumatera dalam rangka melemahkan kekuasaan Sriwijaya dan memperluas pengaruhnya di Nusantara. Ekspedisi ini dikenal dalam sejarah Indonesia dengan nama ekspedisi Pamalayu. Sebagai hasil dari ekspedisi itu, maka Kertanegara pada tahun 1286 mengirimkan acara Amogapasa ke Sumatera sebagai hadiah untuk raja dan rakyat kerajaan Melayu. Dengan kejadian ini dapat diartikan, bahwa semenjak peristiwa itu kerajaan Melayu sudah mengikuti kerajaan Singosari dan menjadi daerah tumpuan untuk menghadapi kemungkinan serangan dari negeri Cina akibat peristiwa penghinaan terhadap utusan Cina sebelumnya. 3. Maharajo Dirajo Dalam hal ini timbul suatu kontradiksi keterangan-keterangan, yaitu nama Maharajo Dirajo sudah disebutkan sebelumnya sebagai salah seorang panglima Iskandar Zulkarnain yang tugaskan menguasai Pulau Emas. Kalau memang demikian keadaannya, lalu bagaimana dengan Maharajo Dirajo yang sedang kita bicarakan ini yang waktunya sudah sangat jauh berbeda. Dalam hal ini kita tidak dapat memberikan jawaban yang pasti. Maharajo Dirajo yang sudah kita bicarakan hanya merupakan perkiraan saja dan belum tentu benar. Tetapi berdasarkan logika berfikir kira-kira diwaktu itulah hidupnya Maharajo Dirajo jika dihubungkan dengan nama Iskandar Zulkarnain. Sedangkan Maharajo Dirajo yang sedang dibicarakan sekarang ini adalah seperti yang dikatakan Tambo Alam Minangkabau yang mana yang benar perlu penelitian lebih lanjut. Dalam kesempatan ini kita hanya ingin memperlihatkan betapa rawannya penafsiran dari data yang diberikan Tambo Alam Minangkabau. Maharajo Dirajo yang sekarang dibicarakan adalah Maharajo Dirajo seperti yang dikatakan Tambo. Dalam hal ini kita ingin mengangkat data dari Tambo menjadi Fakta sejarah Minangkabau. Dalam Tambo disebutkan bahwa Iskandar Zulkarnain mempunyai tiga anak, yaitu Maharajo Alif, Maharajo Dipang, dan Maharajo Dirajo. Maharajo Alif menjadi raja di Benua Ruhun (Romawi), tetapi Josselin de Jong mengatakan, menjadi raja di Turki. Maharajo Dipang menjadi raja di negeri Cina, sedangkan Maharajo Dirajo menjadi raja di Pulau Emas (Sumatera). Kalau kita melihat kalimat-kalimat Tambo sendiri, maka dikatakan sebagai berikut: “…Tatkala maso dahulu, batigo rajo naiek nobat, nan sorang Maharajo Alif, nan pai ka banua Ruhun, nan sorang Maharajo Dipang nan pai ka Nagari Cino, nan sorang Maharajo Dirajo manapek ka pulau ameh nan ko…” (pada masa dahulu kala, ada tiga orang yang naik tahta kerajaan, seorang bernama Maharaja Alif yang pergi ke negeri Ruhun, yang seorang Maharajo Dipang yang pergi ke negeri Cina, dan seorang lagi bernama Maharajo Dirajo yang menepat ke pulau Sumatera). Dari keterangan Tambo itu tidak ada dikatakan angka tahunnya hanya dengan istilah “Masa dahulu kala” itulah yang memberikan petunjuk kepada kita bahwa kejadian itu sudah berlangsung sangat lama sekali, sedangkan waktu yang mencakup zaman dahulu kala itu sangat banyak sekali dan tidak ada kepastiannya. Kita hanya akan bertanya-tanya atau menduga-duga dengan tidak akan mendapat jawaban yang pasti. Di kerajaan Romawi atau Cina memang ada sejarah raja-raja yang besar, tetapi raja mana yang dimaksudkan oleh Tambo tidak kita ketahui. Dalam hal ini rupanya Tambo Alam Minangkabau tidak mementingkan angka tahun selain dari mementingkan kebesaran kemasyuran nama-nama rajanya. Percantuman raja Romawi dalam Tambo menurut hemat kita hanya usaha dari pembuat Tambo untuk menyetarakan kemasyhuran raja Minangkabau dengan nama raja di luar negeri yang memang sudah sangat terkenal di seantero penjuru dunia. Dengan mensejajarkan kedudukan raja-raja Minangkabau dengan raja yang sangat terkenal itu maka pandangan rakyat Minangkabau terhadap rajanya sendiri akan semakin tinggi pula. Disini kita bertemu dengan satu kebiasaan dunia Timur untuk mendongengkan tuah kebesaran rajanya kepada anak cucunya. Gelar Maharajo Dirajo sendiri terlepas ada tidaknya raja tersebut, menunjukan kebesaran kekuasaan rajanya, karena istilah itu berarti penguasa sekalian raja-raja yang tunduk di bawah kekuasaannya. Josselin de Jong mengatakan Lord of the Word atau Raja Dunia. Dalam sejarah Indonesia gelar Maharaja Diraja tidak hanya menjadi milik orang Minangkabau saja, melainkan juga ada raja lain yang bergelar demikian seperti Karta Negara dari Singasari dengan gelar Maharaja Diraja seperti yang tertulis pada arca Amogapasa tahun 1286 sebagai atasan dari Darmasraya yang bernama raja Tribuana. Tambo mengatakan bahwa Maharajo Dirajo adalah raja Minangkabau pertama. Tetapi ada pendapat lain yang mengatakan bahwa Srimaharaja Diraja yang disebut dalam tambo sebagai raja Minangkabau yang pertama itu tidak lain dari Adityawarman sendiri yang menyebut dirinya dengan Maraja Diraja. Tentang Adityawarman mempergunakan gelar Maharaja Diraja memang semua ahli sudah sependapat, karena Adityawarman sendiri telah menulis demikian dalam prasasti Pagaruyung. Dari gelar Maharaja Diraja yang dipakai Adityawarman menunjukan kepada kita bahwa sewaktu Adityawarman berkuasa di Minangkabau tidak ada lagi kekuasaan lain yang ada di atasnya, atau dengan perkataan lain dapat dikatakan pada waktu itu Minangkabau sudah berdiri sendiri, tidak berada di bawah kekuasaan Majapahit atau sudah melepaskan diri dari Majapahit. Kerajaan Majapahit adalah ahli waris dari Singasari. Sedangkan Singasari pernah menundukkan melayu Darmasraya, tentu berada di bawah kekuasaan Singasari - Majapahit itu, maka untuk melepaskan diri dari Singasari - Majapahit itu Adiyawarman memindahkan pusat kekuasaannya kepedalaman Minangkabau dan menyatakan tidak ada lagi yang berkuasa di atasnya dengan memakai gelar Maharaja Diraja. Ada sesuatu pertanyaan kecil yang perlu dijawab, yaitu apakah tidak ada lagi kemungkinan bahwa gelar Maharajo Dirajo itu merupakan gelar keturunan bagi raja-raja Minangkabau, sehingga diwaktu Adityawarman menjadi raja di Minangkabau dia merasa perlu mempergunakan gelar tersebut agar dihormati oleh rakyat Minangkabau. Kalau memang demikian, maka kita akan dapat menghubungkannya dengan Maharajo Dirajo yang kita bicarakan kehidupannya sebelum abad Masehi. Tetapi hal ini kembali hanya berupa dugaan saja yang masih memerlukan pembuktian lebih lanjut. Kalau kita mengikuti pendapat yang mengatakan bahwa Maharaja Diraja itu sama dengan Adityawarman, maka satu kepastian dapat dikatakan bahwa kerajaan Minangkabau baru bermula pad tahun 1347, yaitu pada waktu Adityawarman menjadi raja di Minangkabau yang berpusat di Pagaruyuang. Logikanya tentu sebelum Adityawarman, belum ada raja di Minangkabau, kalau ada baru merupakan daerah-daerahyang dikuasai oleh seorang kepala suku saja. Kalau pendapat itu tidak dapat diterima kebenarannya, maka tokoh Maharajo Dirajo yang disebut di dalam Tambo itu masih tetap merupakan seorang tokoh legendaris dalam sejarah Minangkabau dan hal ini akan tetap mengundang bermacam-macam pertanyaan yang pro dan kontra. Kemungkinan gelar Maharajo sudah dipergunakan sebelum kedatangan Adityawarman memang ada. Tetapi apakah gelar itu merupakan gelar keturunan dari raja-raja Minangkabau masih belum lagi dapat diketahui dengan pasti. Yang jelas pada waktu sekarang ini, banyak gelar para penghulu di Sumatera Barat yang memakai gelar Maharajo sebagai gelar kepenghulunya disamping nama lainnya, seperti Dt. Maharajo, Dt. Marajo, Dt. Maharajo Basa, Dt. Maharajo Dirajo. Kelihatan gelar tersebut dipergunakan oleh masyarakat Minangkabau sebagai gelar pusaka yang turun-menurun. Sebaliknya raja-raja Pagaruyung sendiri tidak mempergunakan gelar tersebut sebagai pusaka kerajaannya. Jadi, dapat disimpulkan bahwa gelar Maharajo Dirajo tersebut merupakan gelar pusaka Minangkabau dan sudah ada sebelum Adityawarman menjadi raja di Pagaruyung. Barangkali memang gelar itu diturunkan dari Maharajo dirajo seperti disebutkan dalam Tambo itu.> ZAMAN MINANGKABAU

Bus Transjakarta keluar asap di depan kantor Jokowi

Bus Transjakarta telah kembali mengalami kerusakan. Bus rute Harmoni-Pulogadung TB.020 mogok di depan Balai Kota Jakarta pada pukul 07.49 pagi WIB. Mogoknya busway telah diakibatkan oleh asap yang keluar dari mesin belakang.

"Tadi lagi jalan, kita lihat semua asap keluar dari mesin belakang," ujar Satgas Transjakarta, Sari saat ditemui di lokasi, Selasa (11/3).

Sari juga mengatakan, ada sekitar delapan penumpang yang berada dalam bus Transjakarta tersebut. Namun, saat ini seluruh penumpang tersebut telah dievakuasi ke bus Transjakarta lainnya.

"Ada delapan orang penumpang tapi tidak apa-apa, sudah kita alihkan ke Transjakarta yang lain," jelasnya.

Saat ini, bus Transjakarta tersebut juga sudah diderek oleh kendaraan Dinas Perhubungan. Tidak ada efek kemacetan dari mogoknya Transjakarta tersebut.

Take the Money and Run

The career criminals in genre novels don’t have money problems. If they need some, they just go out and steal it. But such financial transactions can backfire, which is what happened back in 2004 when the Texas gang in Michael

Obama Finds a Bolder Voice on Race Issues

As he reflected on the festering wounds deepened by race and grievance that have been on painful display in America’s cities lately, President Obama on Monday found himself thinking about a young man he had just met named Malachi.

A few minutes before, in a closed-door round-table discussion at Lehman College in the Bronx, Mr. Obama had asked a group of black and Hispanic students from disadvantaged backgrounds what could be done to help them reach their goals. Several talked about counseling and guidance programs.

“Malachi, he just talked about — we should talk about love,” Mr. Obama told a crowd afterward, drifting away from his prepared remarks. “Because Malachi and I shared the fact that our dad wasn’t around and that sometimes we wondered why he wasn’t around and what had happened. But really, that’s what this comes down to is: Do we love these kids?”

Many presidents have governed during times of racial tension, but Mr. Obama is the first to see in the mirror a face that looks like those on the other side of history’s ledger. While his first term was consumed with the economy, war and health care, his second keeps coming back to the societal divide that was not bridged by his election. A president who eschewed focusing on race now seems to have found his voice again as he thinks about how to use his remaining time in office and beyond.

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Obama Speaks of a ‘Sense of Unfairness’

In the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors, the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January 2017.

“This will remain a mission for me and for Michelle not just for the rest of my presidency but for the rest of my life,” Mr. Obama said. “And the reason is simple,” he added. Referring to some of the youths he had just met, he said: “We see ourselves in these young men. I grew up without a dad. I grew up lost sometimes and adrift, not having a sense of a clear path. The only difference between me and a lot of other young men in this neighborhood and all across the country is that I grew up in an environment that was a little more forgiving.”

Organizers said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News Corporation. The money will be used to help companies address obstacles facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.

Joe Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and Philadelphia.

The alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action, and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the president by contributing.

“The Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One en route to New York. But he added, “I’m confident that the members of the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”

The alliance was in the works before the disturbances last week after the death of Freddie Gray, the black man who suffered fatal injuries while in police custody in Baltimore, but it reflected the evolution of Mr. Obama’s presidency. For him, in a way, it is coming back to issues that animated him as a young community organizer and politician. It was his own struggle with race and identity, captured in his youthful memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” that stood him apart from other presidential aspirants.

But that was a side of him that he kept largely to himself through the first years of his presidency while he focused on other priorities like turning the economy around, expanding government-subsidized health care and avoiding electoral land mines en route to re-election.

After securing a second term, Mr. Obama appeared more emboldened. Just a month after his 2013 inauguration, he talked passionately about opportunity and race with a group of teenage boys in Chicago, a moment aides point to as perhaps the first time he had spoken about these issues in such a personal, powerful way as president. A few months later, he publicly lamented the death of Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teenager, saying that “could have been me 35 years ago.”

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That case, along with public ruptures of anger over police shootings in Ferguson and elsewhere, have pushed the issue of race and law enforcement onto the public agenda. Aides said they imagined that with his presidency in its final stages, Mr. Obama might be thinking more about what comes next and causes he can advance as a private citizen.

That is not to say that his public discussion of these issues has been universally welcomed. Some conservatives said he had made matters worse by seeming in their view to blame police officers in some of the disputed cases.

“President Obama, when he was elected, could have been a unifying leader,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican candidate for president, said at a forum last week. “He has made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions.”

On the other side of the ideological spectrum, some liberal African-American activists have complained that Mr. Obama has not done enough to help downtrodden communities. While he is speaking out more, these critics argue, he has hardly used the power of the presidency to make the sort of radical change they say is necessary.

The line Mr. Obama has tried to straddle has been a serrated one. He condemns police brutality as he defends most officers as honorable. He condemns “criminals and thugs” who looted in Baltimore while expressing empathy with those trapped in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness.

In the Bronx on Monday, Mr. Obama bemoaned the death of Brian Moore, a plainclothes New York police officer who had died earlier in the day after being shot in the head Saturday on a Queens street. Most police officers are “good and honest and fair and care deeply about their communities,” even as they put their lives on the line, Mr. Obama said.

“Which is why in addressing the issues in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York, the point I made was that if we’re just looking at policing, we’re looking at it too narrowly,” he added. “If we ask the police to simply contain and control problems that we ourselves have been unwilling to invest and solve, that’s not fair to the communities, it’s not fair to the police.”

Moreover, if society writes off some people, he said, “that’s not the kind of country I want to live in; that’s not what America is about.”

His message to young men like Malachi Hernandez, who attends Boston Latin Academy in Massachusetts, is not to give up.

“I want you to know you matter,” he said. “You matter to us.”

Ex-C.I.A. Official Rebuts Republican Claims on Benghazi Attack in ‘The Great War of Our Time’

WASHINGTON — The former deputy director of the C.I.A. asserts in a forthcoming book that Republicans, in their eagerness to politicize the killing of the American ambassador to Libya, repeatedly distorted the agency’s analysis of events. But he also argues that the C.I.A. should get out of the business of providing “talking points” for administration officials in national security events that quickly become partisan, as happened after the Benghazi attack in 2012.

The official, Michael J. Morell, dismisses the allegation that the United States military and C.I.A. officers “were ordered to stand down and not come to the rescue of their comrades,” and he says there is “no evidence” to support the charge that “there was a conspiracy between C.I.A. and the White House to spin the Benghazi story in a way that would protect the political interests of the president and Secretary Clinton,” referring to the secretary of state at the time, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But he also concludes that the White House itself embellished some of the talking points provided by the Central Intelligence Agency and had blocked him from sending an internal study of agency conclusions to Congress.

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“I finally did so without asking,” just before leaving government, he writes, and after the White House released internal emails to a committee investigating the State Department’s handling of the issue.

A lengthy congressional investigation remains underway, one that many Republicans hope to use against Mrs. Clinton in the 2016 election cycle.

In parts of the book, “The Great War of Our Time” (Twelve), Mr. Morell praises his C.I.A. colleagues for many successes in stopping terrorist attacks, but he is surprisingly critical of other C.I.A. failings — and those of the National Security Agency.

Soon after Mr. Morell retired in 2013 after 33 years in the agency, President Obama appointed him to a commission reviewing the actions of the National Security Agency after the disclosures of Edward J. Snowden, a former intelligence contractor who released classified documents about the government’s eavesdropping abilities. Mr. Morell writes that he was surprised by what he found.

“You would have thought that of all the government entities on the planet, the one least vulnerable to such grand theft would have been the N.S.A.,” he writes. “But it turned out that the N.S.A. had left itself vulnerable.”

He concludes that most Wall Street firms had better cybersecurity than the N.S.A. had when Mr. Snowden swept information from its systems in 2013. While he said he found himself “chagrined by how well the N.S.A. was doing” compared with the C.I.A. in stepping up its collection of data on intelligence targets, he also sensed that the N.S.A., which specializes in electronic spying, was operating without considering the implications of its methods.

“The N.S.A. had largely been collecting information because it could, not necessarily in all cases because it should,” he says.

The book is to be released next week.

Mr. Morell was a career analyst who rose through the ranks of the agency, and he ended up in the No. 2 post. He served as President George W. Bush’s personal intelligence briefer in the first months of his presidency — in those days, he could often be spotted at the Starbucks in Waco, Tex., catching up on his reading — and was with him in the schoolhouse in Florida on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the Bush presidency changed in an instant.

Mr. Morell twice took over as acting C.I.A. director, first when Leon E. Panetta was appointed secretary of defense and then when retired Gen. David H. Petraeus resigned over an extramarital affair with his biographer, a relationship that included his handing her classified notes of his time as America’s best-known military commander.

Mr. Morell says he first learned of the affair from Mr. Petraeus only the night before he resigned, and just as the Benghazi events were turning into a political firestorm. While praising Mr. Petraeus, who had told his deputy “I am very lucky” to run the C.I.A., Mr. Morell writes that “the organization did not feel the same way about him.” The former general “created the impression through the tone of his voice and his body language that he did not want people to disagree with him (which was not true in my own interaction with him),” he says.

But it is his account of the Benghazi attacks — and how the C.I.A. was drawn into the debate over whether the Obama White House deliberately distorted its account of the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens — that is bound to attract attention, at least partly because of its relevance to the coming presidential election. The initial assessments that the C.I.A. gave to the White House said demonstrations had preceded the attack. By the time analysts reversed their opinion, Susan E. Rice, now the national security adviser, had made a series of statements on Sunday talk shows describing the initial assessment. The controversy and other comments Ms. Rice made derailed Mr. Obama’s plan to appoint her as secretary of state.

The experience prompted Mr. Morell to write that the C.I.A. should stay out of the business of preparing talking points — especially on issues that are being seized upon for “political purposes.” He is critical of the State Department for not beefing up security in Libya for its diplomats, as the C.I.A., he said, did for its employees.

But he concludes that the assault in which the ambassador was killed took place “with little or no advance planning” and “was not well organized.” He says the attackers “did not appear to be looking for Americans to harm. They appeared intent on looting and conducting some vandalism,” setting fires that killed Mr. Stevens and a security official, Sean Smith.

Mr. Morell paints a picture of an agency that was struggling, largely unsuccessfully, to understand dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa when the Arab Spring broke out in late 2011 in Tunisia. The agency’s analysts failed to see the forces of revolution coming — and then failed again, he writes, when they told Mr. Obama that the uprisings would undercut Al Qaeda by showing there was a democratic pathway to change.

“There is no good explanation for our not being able to see the pressures growing to dangerous levels across the region,” he writes. The agency had again relied too heavily “on a handful of strong leaders in the countries of concern to help us understand what was going on in the Arab street,” he says, and those leaders themselves were clueless.

Moreover, an agency that has always overvalued secretly gathered intelligence and undervalued “open source” material “was not doing enough to mine the wealth of information available through social media,” he writes. “We thought and told policy makers that this outburst of popular revolt would damage Al Qaeda by undermining the group’s narrative,” he writes.

Instead, weak governments in Egypt, and the absence of governance from Libya to Yemen, were “a boon to Islamic extremists across both the Middle East and North Africa.”

Mr. Morell is gentle about most of the politicians he dealt with — he expresses admiration for both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama, though he accuses former Vice President Dick Cheney of deliberately implying a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq that the C.I.A. had concluded probably did not exist. But when it comes to the events leading up to the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq, he is critical of his own agency.

Mr. Morell concludes that the Bush White House did not have to twist intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s alleged effort to rekindle the country’s work on weapons of mass destruction.

“The view that hard-liners in the Bush administration forced the intelligence community into its position on W.M.D. is just flat wrong,” he writes. “No one pushed. The analysts were already there and they had been there for years, long before Bush came to office.”

Fatal Police Shootings: Accounts Since Ferguson

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Rolf Smedvig, Trumpeter in the Empire Brass, Dies at 62

A former member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Smedvig helped found the wide-ranging Empire Brass quintet.

Richard Suzman, 72, Dies; Researcher Influenced Global Surveys on Aging

At the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Suzman’s signature accomplishment was the central role he played in creating a global network of surveys on aging.

Cher and Marc Jacobs

Dean Skelos, Albany Senate Leader, Aided Son at All Costs, U.S. Says

Over the last five years or so, it seemed there was little that Dean G. Skelos, the majority leader of the New York Senate, would not do for his son.

He pressed a powerful real estate executive to provide commissions to his son, a 32-year-old title insurance salesman, according to a federal criminal complaint. He helped get him a job at an environmental company and employed his influence to help the company get government work. He used his office to push natural gas drilling regulations that would have increased his son’s commissions.

He even tried to direct part of a $5.4 billion state budget windfall to fund government contracts that the company was seeking. And when the company was close to securing a storm-water contract from Nassau County, the senator, through an intermediary, pressured the company to pay his son more — or risk having the senator subvert the bid.

The criminal complaint, unsealed on Monday, lays out corruption charges against Senator Skelos and his son, Adam B. Skelos, the latest scandal to seize Albany, and potentially alter its power structure.

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The repeated and diverse efforts by Senator Skelos, a Long Island Republican, to use what prosecutors said was his political influence to find work, or at least income, for his son could send both men to federal prison. If they are convicted of all six charges against them, they face up to 20 years in prison for each of four of the six counts and up to 10 years for the remaining two.

Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, of Long Island, who serves as chairman of the Republican conference, emerged from a closed-door meeting Monday night to say that conference members agreed that Mr. Skelos should be benefited the “presumption of innocence,” and would stay in his leadership role.

“The leader has indicated he would like to remain as leader,” said Mr. LaValle, “and he has the support of the conference.” The case against Mr. Skelos and his son grew out of a broader inquiry into political corruption by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, that has already changed the face of the state capital. It is based in part, according to the six-count complaint, on conversations secretly recorded by one of two cooperating witnesses, and wiretaps on the cellphones of the senator and his son. Those recordings revealed that both men were concerned about electronic surveillance, and illustrated the son’s unsuccessful efforts to thwart it.

Adam Skelos took to using a “burner” phone, the complaint says, and told his father he wanted them to speak through a FaceTime video call in an apparent effort to avoid detection. They also used coded language at times.

At one point, Adam Skelos was recorded telling a Senate staff member of his frustration in not being able to speak openly to his father on the phone, noting that he could not “just send smoke signals or a little pigeon” carrying a message.

The 43-page complaint, sworn out by Paul M. Takla, a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlines a five-year scheme to “monetize” the senator’s official position; it also lays bare the extent to which a father sought to use his position to help his son.

The charges accuse the two men of extorting payments through a real estate developer, Glenwood Management, based on Long Island, and the environmental company, AbTech Industries, in Scottsdale, Ariz., with the expectation that the money paid to Adam Skelos — nearly $220,000 in total — would influence his father’s actions.

Glenwood, one of the state’s most prolific campaign donors, had ties to AbTech through investments in the environmental firm’s parent company by Glenwood’s founding family and a senior executive.

The accusations in the complaint portray Senator Skelos as a man who, when it came to his son, was not shy about twisting arms, even in situations that might give other arm-twisters pause.

Seeking to help his son, Senator Skelos turned to the executive at Glenwood, which develops rental apartments in New York City and has much at stake when it comes to real estate legislation in Albany. The senator urged him to direct business to his son, who sold title insurance.

After much prodding, the executive, Charles C. Dorego, engineered a $20,000 payment to Adam Skelos from a title insurance company even though he did no work for the money. But far more lucrative was a consultant position that Mr. Dorego arranged for Adam Skelos at AbTech, which seeks government contracts to treat storm water. (Mr. Dorego is not identified by name in the complaint, but referred to only as CW-1, for Cooperating Witness 1.)

Senator Skelos appeared to take an active interest in his son’s new line of work. Adam Skelos sent him several drafts of his consulting agreement with AbTech, the complaint says, as well as the final deal that was struck.

“Mazel tov,” his father replied.

Senator Skelos sent relevant news articles to his son, including one about a sewage leak near Albany. When AbTech wanted to seek government contracts after Hurricane Sandy, the senator got on a conference call with his son and an AbTech executive, Bjornulf White, and offered advice. (Like Mr. Dorego, Mr. White is not named in the complaint, but referred to as CW-2.)

The assistance paid off: With the senator’s help, AbTech secured a contract worth up to $12 million from Nassau County, a big break for a struggling small business.

But the money was slow to materialize. The senator expressed impatience with county officials.

Adam Skelos, in a phone call with Mr. White in late December, suggested that his father would seek to punish the county. “I tell you this, the state is not going to do a [expletive] thing for the county,” he said.

Three days later, Senator Skelos pressed his case with the Nassau County executive, Edward P. Mangano, a fellow Republican. “Somebody feels like they’re just getting jerked around the last two years,” the senator said, referring to his son in what the complaint described as “coded language.”

The next day, the senator pursued the matter, as he and Mr. Mangano attended a wake for a slain New York City police officer. Senator Skelos then reassured his son, who called him while he was still at the wake. “All claims that are in will be taken care of,” the senator said.

AbTech’s fortunes appeared to weigh on his son. At one point in January, Adam Skelos told his father that if the company did not succeed, he would “lose the ability to pay for things.”

Making matters worse, in recent months, Senator Skelos and his son appeared to grow wary about who was watching them. In addition to making calls on the burner phone, Adam Skelos said he used the FaceTime video calling “because that doesn’t show up on the phone bill,” as he told Mr. White.

In late February, Adam Skelos arranged a pair of meetings between Mr. White and state senators; AbTech needed to win state legislation that would allow its contract to move beyond its initial stages. But Senator Skelos deemed the plan too risky and caused one of the meetings to be canceled.

In another recorded call, Adam Skelos, promising to be “very, very vague” on the phone, urged his father to allow the meeting. The senator offered a warning. “Right now we are in dangerous times, Adam,” he told him.

A month later, in another phone call that was recorded by the authorities, Adam Skelos complained that his father could not give him “real advice” about AbTech while the two men were speaking over the telephone.

“You can’t talk normally,” he told his father, “because it’s like [expletive] Preet Bharara is listening to every [expletive] phone call. It’s just [expletive] frustrating.”

“It is,” his father agreed.

Verne Gagne, Wrestler Who Grappled Through Two Eras, Dies at 89

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Dan Walker, 92, Dies; Illinois Governor and Later a U.S. Prisoner

As governor, Mr. Walker alienated Republicans and his fellow Democrats, particularly the Democratic powerhouse Richard J. Daley, the mayor of Chicago.

From T Magazine: Street Lit’s Power Couple

THE WRITERS ASHLEY AND JAQUAVIS COLEMAN know the value of a good curtain-raiser. The couple have co-authored dozens of novels, and they like to start them with a bang: a headlong action sequence, a blast of violence or sex that rocks readers back on their heels. But the Colemans concede they would be hard-pressed to dream up anything more gripping than their own real-life opening scene.

In the summer of 2001, JaQuavis Coleman was a 16-year-old foster child in Flint, Mich., the former auto-manufacturing mecca that had devolved, in the wake of General Motors’ plant closures, into one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a decimated economy and a violent crime rate more than three times the national average. When JaQuavis was 8, social services had removed him from his mother’s home. He spent years bouncing between foster families. At 16, JaQuavis was also a businessman: a crack dealer with a network of street-corner peddlers in his employ.

One day that summer, JaQuavis met a fellow dealer in a parking lot on Flint’s west side. He was there to make a bulk sale of a quarter-brick, or “nine-piece” — a nine-ounce parcel of cocaine, with a street value of about $11,000. In the middle of the transaction, JaQuavis heard the telltale chirp of a walkie-talkie. His customer, he now realized, was an undercover policeman. JaQuavis jumped into his car and spun out onto the road, with two unmarked police cars in pursuit. He didn’t want to get into a high-speed chase, so he whipped his car into a church parking lot and made a run for it, darting into an alleyway behind a row of small houses, where he tossed the quarter-brick into some bushes. When JaQuavis reached the small residential street on the other side of the houses, he was greeted by the police, who handcuffed him and went to search behind the houses where, they told him, they were certain he had ditched the drugs. JaQuavis had been dealing since he was 12, had amassed more than $100,000 and had never been arrested. Now, he thought: It’s over.

But when the police looked in the bushes, they couldn’t find any cocaine. They interrogated JaQuavis, who denied having ever possessed or sold drugs. They combed the backyard alley some more. After an hour of fruitless efforts, the police were forced to unlock the handcuffs and release their suspect.

JaQuavis was baffled by the turn of events until the next day, when he received a phone call. The previous afternoon, a 15-year-old girl had been sitting in her home on the west side of Flint when she heard sirens. She looked out of the window of her bedroom, and watched a young man throw a package in the bushes behind her house. She recognized him. He was a high school classmate — a handsome, charismatic boy whom she had admired from afar. The girl crept outside and grabbed the bundle, which she hid in her basement. “I have something that belongs to you,” Ashley Snell told JaQuavis Coleman when she reached him by phone. “You wanna come over here and pick it up?”

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In the Colemans’ first novel, “Dirty Money” (2005), they told a version of this story. The outline was the same: the drug deal gone bad, the dope chucked in the bushes, the fateful phone call. To the extent that the authors took poetic license, it was to tone down the meet-cute improbability of the true-life events. In “Dirty Money,” the girl, Anari, and the crack dealer, Maurice, circle each other warily for a year or so before coupling up. But the facts of Ashley and JaQuavis’s romance outstripped pulp fiction. They fell in love more or less at first sight, moved into their own apartment while still in high school and were married in 2008. “We were together from the day we met,” Ashley says. “I don’t think we’ve spent more than a week apart in total over the past 14 years.”

That partnership turned out to be creative and entrepreneurial as well as romantic. Over the past decade, the Colemans have published nearly 50 books, sometimes as solo writers, sometimes under pseudonyms, but usually as collaborators with a byline that has become a trusted brand: “Ashley & JaQuavis.” They are marquee stars of urban fiction, or street lit, a genre whose inner-city settings and lurid mix of crime, sex and sensationalism have earned it comparisons to gangsta rap. The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned. Street lit is subject to a kind of triple snobbery: scorned by literati who look down on genre fiction generally, ignored by a white publishing establishment that remains largely indifferent to black books and disparaged by African-American intellectuals for poor writing, coarse values and trafficking in racial stereotypes.

But if a certain kind of cultural prestige is shut off to the Colemans, they have reaped other rewards. They’ve built a large and loyal fan base, which gobbles up the new Ashley & JaQuavis titles that arrive every few months. Many of those books are sold at street-corner stands and other off-the-grid venues in African-American neighborhoods, a literary gray market that doesn’t register a blip on best-seller tallies. Yet the Colemans’ most popular series now regularly crack the trade fiction best-seller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. For years, the pair had no literary agent; they sold hundreds of thousands of books without banking a penny in royalties. Still, they have earned millions of dollars, almost exclusively from cash-for-manuscript deals negotiated directly with independent publishing houses. In short, though little known outside of the world of urban fiction, the Colemans are one of America’s most successful literary couples, a distinction they’ve achieved, they insist, because of their work’s gritty authenticity and their devotion to a primal literary virtue: the power of the ripping yarn.

“When you read our books, you’re gonna realize: ‘Ashley & JaQuavis are storytellers,’ ” says Ashley. “Our tales will get your heart pounding.”

THE COLEMANS’ HOME BASE — the cottage from which they operate their cottage industry — is a spacious four-bedroom house in a genteel suburb about 35 miles north of downtown Detroit. The house is plush, but when I visited this past winter, it was sparsely appointed. The couple had just recently moved in, and had only had time to fully furnish the bedroom of their 4-year-old son, Quaye.

In conversation, Ashley and JaQuavis exude both modesty and bravado: gratitude for their good fortune and bootstrappers’ pride in having made their own luck. They talk a lot about their time in the trenches, the years they spent as a drug dealer and “ride-or-die girl” tandem. In Flint they learned to “grind hard.” Writing, they say, is merely a more elevated kind of grind.

“Instead of hitting the block like we used to, we hit the laptops,” says Ashley. “I know what every word is worth. So while I’m writing, I’m like: ‘Okay, there’s a hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars. There’s five thousand dollars.’ ”

They maintain a rigorous regimen. They each try to write 5,000 words per day, five days a week. The writers stagger their shifts: JaQuavis goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up early, around 3 or 4 in the morning, to work while his wife and child sleep. Ashley writes during the day, often in libraries or at Starbucks.

They divide the labor in other ways. Chapters are divvied up more or less equally, with tasks assigned according to individual strengths. (JaQuavis typically handles character development. Ashley loves writing murder scenes.) The results are stitched together, with no editorial interference from one author in the other’s text. The real work, they contend, is the brainstorming. The Colemans spend weeks mapping out their plot-driven books — long conversations that turn into elaborate diagrams on dry-erase boards. “JaQuavis and I are so close, it makes the process real easy,” says Ashley. “Sometimes when I’m thinking of something, a plot point, he’ll say it out loud, and I’m like: ‘Wait — did I say that?’ ”

Their collaboration developed by accident, and on the fly. Both were bookish teenagers. Ashley read lots of Judy Blume and John Grisham; JaQuavis liked Shakespeare, Richard Wright and “Atlas Shrugged.” (Their first official date was at a Borders bookstore, where Ashley bought “The Coldest Winter Ever,” the Sister Souljah novel often credited with kick-starting the contemporary street-lit movement.) In 2003, Ashley, then 17, was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. She was bedridden for three weeks, and to provide distraction and boost her spirits, JaQuavis challenged his girlfriend to a writing contest. “She just wasn’t talking. She was laying in bed. I said, ‘You know what? I bet you I could write a better book than you.’ My wife is real competitive. So I said, ‘Yo, all right, $500 bet.’ And I saw her eyes spark, like, ‘What?! You can’t write no better book than me!’ So I wrote about three chapters. She wrote about three chapters. Two days later, we switched.”

The result, hammered out in a few days, would become “Dirty Money.” Two years later, when Ashley and JaQuavis were students at Ferris State University in Western Michigan, they sold the manuscript to Urban Books, a street-lit imprint founded by the best-selling author Carl Weber. At the time, JaQuavis was still making his living selling drugs. When Ashley got the phone call informing her that their book had been bought, she assumed they’d hit it big, and flushed more than $10,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet. Their advance was a mere $4,000.

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Those advances would soon increase, eventually reaching five and six figures. The Colemans built their career, JaQuavis says, in a manner that made sense to him as a veteran dope peddler: by flooding the street with product. From the start, they were prolific, churning out books at a rate of four or five a year. Their novels made their way into stores; the now-defunct chain Waldenbooks, which had stores in urban areas typically bypassed by booksellers, was a major engine of the street-lit market. But Ashley and JaQuavis took advantage of distribution channels established by pioneering urban fiction authors such as Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, and a network of street-corner tables, magazine stands, corner shops and bodegas. Like rappers who establish their bona fides with gray-market mixtapes, street-lit authors use this system to circumnavigate industry gatekeepers, bringing their work straight to the genre’s core readership. But urban fiction has other aficionados, in less likely places. “Our books are so popular in the prison system,” JaQuavis says. “We’re banned in certain penitentiaries. Inmates fight over the books — there are incidents, you know? I have loved ones in jail, and they’re like: ‘Yo, your books can’t come in here. It’s against the rules.’ ”

The appeal of the Colemans’ work is not hard to fathom. The books are formulaic and taut; they deliver the expected goods efficiently and exuberantly. The titles telegraph the contents: “Diary of a Street Diva,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Murderville.” The novels serve up a stream of explicit sex and violence in a slangy, tangy, profane voice. In Ashley & JaQuavis’s books people don’t get killed: they get “popped,” “laid out,” get their “cap twisted back.” The smut is constant, with emphasis on the earthy, sticky, olfactory particulars. Romance novel clichés — shuddering orgasms, heroic carnal feats, superlative sexual skill sets — are rendered in the Colemans’ punchy patois.

Subtlety, in other words, isn’t Ashley & JaQuavis’s forte. But their books do have a grainy specificity. In “The Cartel” (2008), the first novel in the Colemans’ best-selling saga of a Miami drug syndicate, they catch the sights and smells of a crack workshop in a housing project: the nostril-stinging scent of cocaine and baking soda bubbling on stovetops; the teams of women, stripped naked except for hospital masks so they can’t pilfer the merchandise, “cutting up the cooked coke on the round wood table.” The subject matter is dark, but the Colemans’ tone is not quite noir. Even in the grimmest scenes, the mood is high-spirited, with the writers palpably relishing the lewd and gory details: the bodies writhing in boudoirs and crumpling under volleys of bullets, the geysers of blood and other bodily fluids.

The luridness of street lit has made it a flashpoint, inciting controversy reminiscent of the hip-hop culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. But the street-lit debate touches deeper historical roots, reviving decades-old arguments in black literary circles about the mandate to uplift the race and present wholesome images of African-Americans. In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois slammed the “licentiousness” of “Home to Harlem,” Claude McKay’s rollicking novel of Harlem nightlife. McKay’s book, Du Bois wrote, “for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Similar sentiments have greeted 21st-century street lit. In a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed essay, the journalist and author Nick Chiles decried “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction.” African-American bookstores, Chiles complained, are “overrun with novels that . . . appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures — as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.”

Copulating paperbacks aside, it’s clear that the street-lit debate is about more than literature, touching on questions of paternalism versus populism, and on middle-class anxieties about the black underclass. “It’s part and parcel of black elites’ efforts to define not only a literary tradition, but a racial politics,” said Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. “There has always been a sense that because African-Americans’ opportunities to represent themselves are so limited in the first place, any hint of criminality or salaciousness would necessarily be a knock on the entire racial politics. One of the pressing debates about African-American literature today is: If we can’t include writers like Ashley & JaQuavis, to what extent is the foundation of our thinking about black literature faulty? Is it just a literature for elites? Or can it be inclusive, bringing urban fiction under the purview of our umbrella term ‘African-American literature’?”

Defenders of street lit note that the genre has a pedigree: a tradition of black pulp fiction that stretches from Chester Himes, the midcentury author of hardboiled Harlem detective stories, to the 1960s and ’70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, to the current wave of urban fiction authors. Others argue for street lit as a social good, noting that it attracts a large audience that might otherwise never read at all. Scholars like Nishikawa link street lit to recent studies showing increased reading among African-Americans. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that a greater percentage of black Americans are book readers than whites or Latinos.

For their part, the Colemans place their work in the broader black literary tradition. “You have Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin — all of these traditional black writers, who wrote about the struggles of racism, injustice, inequality,” says Ashley. “We’re writing about the struggle as it happens now. It’s just a different struggle. I’m telling my story. I’m telling the struggle of a black girl from Flint, Michigan, who grew up on welfare.”

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Perhaps there is a high-minded case to be made for street lit. But the virtues of Ashley & JaQuavis’s work are more basic. Their novels do lack literary polish. The writing is not graceful; there are passages of clunky exposition and sex scenes that induce guffaws and eye rolls. But the pleasure quotient is high. The books flaunt a garish brand of feminism, with women characters cast not just as vixens, but also as gangsters — cold-blooded killers, “murder mamas.” The stories are exceptionally well-plotted. “The Cartel” opens by introducing its hero, the crime boss Carter Diamond; on page 9, a gunshot spatters Diamond’s brain across the interior of a police cruiser. The book then flashes back seven years and begins to hurtle forward again — a bullet train, whizzing readers through shifting alliances, romantic entanglements and betrayals, kidnappings, shootouts with Haitian and Dominican gangsters, and a cliffhanger closing scene that leaves the novel’s heroine tied to a chair in a basement, gruesomely tortured to the edge of death. Ashley & JaQuavis’s books are not Ralph Ellison, certainly, but they build up quite a head of steam. They move.

The Colemans are moving themselves these days. They recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, which will bring out the next installment in the “Cartel” series as well as new solo series by both writers. The St. Martin’s deal is both lucrative and legitimizing — a validation of Ashley and JaQuavis’s work by one of publishing’s most venerable houses. The Colemans’ ambitions have grown, as well. A recent trilogy, “Murderville,” tackles human trafficking and the blood-diamond industry in West Africa, with storylines that sweep from Sierra Leone to Mexico to Los Angeles. Increasingly, Ashley & JaQuavis are leaning on research — traveling to far-flung settings and hitting the books in the libraries — and spending less time mining their own rough-and-tumble past.

But Flint remains a source of inspiration. One evening not long ago, JaQuavis led me on a tour of his hometown: a popular roadside bar; the parking lot where he met the undercover cop for the ill-fated drug deal; Ashley’s old house, the site of his almost-arrest. He took me to a ramshackle vehicle repair shop on Flint’s west side, where he worked as a kid, washing cars. He showed me a bathroom at the rear of the garage, where, at age 12, he sneaked away to inspect the first “boulder” of crack that he ever sold. A spray-painted sign on the garage wall, which JaQuavis remembered from his time at the car wash, offered words of warning:

WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT USING A GUN:
MURDER . . . 30 Years
ARMED ROBBERY . . . 15 Years
ASSAULT . . . 15 Years
RAPE . . . 20 Years
POSSESSION . . . 5 Years
JACKING . . . 20 YEARS

“We still love Flint, Michigan,” JaQuavis says. “It’s so seedy, so treacherous. But there’s some heart in this city. This is where it all started, selling books out the box. In the days when we would get those little $40,000 advances, they’d send us a couple boxes of books for free. We would hit the streets to sell our books, right out of the car trunk. It was a hustle. It still is.”

One old neighborhood asset that the Colemans have not shaken off is swagger. “My wife is the best female writer in the game,” JaQuavis told me. “I believe I’m the best male writer in the game. I’m sleeping next to the best writer in the world. And she’s doing the same.”

Dave Goldberg, Head of Web Survey Company and Half of a Silicon Valley Power Couple, Dies at 47

By VINDU GOEL and QUENTIN HARDY

Mr. Goldberg was a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist who was married to Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook.

Dave Goldberg Was Lifelong Women’s Advocate

Gene Fullmer, a Brawling Middleweight Champion, Dies at 83

Fullmer, who reigned when fight clubs abounded and Friday night fights were a television staple, was known for his title bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio.

Finding Scandal in New York and New Jersey, but No Shame

From sea to shining sea, or at least from one side of the Hudson to the other, politicians you have barely heard of are being accused of wrongdoing. There were so many court proceedings involving public officials on Monday that it was hard to keep up.

In Newark, two underlings of Gov. Chris Christie were arraigned on charges that they were in on the truly deranged plot to block traffic leading onto the George Washington Bridge.

Ten miles away, in Lower Manhattan, Dean G. Skelos, the leader of the New York State Senate, and his son, Adam B. Skelos, were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on accusations of far more conventional political larceny, involving a job with a sewer company for the son and commissions on title insurance and bond work.

The younger man managed to receive a 150 percent pay increase from the sewer company even though, as he said on tape, he “literally knew nothing about water or, you know, any of that stuff,” according to a criminal complaint the United States attorney’s office filed.

The success of Adam Skelos, 32, was attributed by prosecutors to his father’s influence as the leader of the Senate and as a potentate among state Republicans. The indictment can also be read as one of those unfailingly sad tales of a father who cannot stop indulging a grown son. The senator himself is not alleged to have profited from the schemes, except by being relieved of the burden of underwriting Adam.

The bridge traffic caper is its own species of crazy; what distinguishes the charges against the two Skeloses is the apparent absence of a survival instinct. It is one thing not to know anything about water or that stuff. More remarkable, if true, is the fact that the sewer machinations continued even after the former New York Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, was charged in January with taking bribes disguised as fees.

It was by then common gossip in political and news media circles that Senator Skelos, a Republican, the counterpart in the Senate to Mr. Silver, a Democrat, in the Assembly, could be next in line for the criminal dock. “Stay tuned,” the United States attorney, Preet Bharara said, leaving not much to the imagination.

Even though the cat had been unmistakably belled, Skelos father and son continued to talk about how to advance the interests of the sewer company, though the son did begin to use a burner cellphone, the kind people pay for in cash, with no traceable contracts.

That was indeed prudent, as prosecutors had been wiretapping the cellphones of both men. But it would seem that the burner was of limited value, because by then the prosecutors had managed to secure the help of a business executive who agreed to record calls with the Skeloses. It would further seem that the business executive was more attentive to the perils of pending investigations than the politician.

Through the end of the New York State budget negotiations in March, the hopes of the younger Skelos rested on his father’s ability to devise legislation that would benefit the sewer company. That did not pan out. But Senator Skelos did boast that he had haggled with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, in a successful effort to raise a $150 million allocation for Long Island to $550 million, for what the budget called “transformative economic development projects.” It included money for the kind of work done by the sewer company.

The lawyer for Adam Skelos said he was not guilty and would win in court. Senator Skelos issued a ringing declaration that he was unequivocally innocent.

THIS was also the approach taken in New Jersey by Bill Baroni, a man of great presence and eloquence who stopped outside the federal courthouse to note that he had taken risks as a Republican by bucking his party to support paid family leave, medical marijuana and marriage equality. “I would never risk my career, my job, my reputation for something like this,” Mr. Baroni said. “I am an innocent man.”

The lawyer for his co-defendant, Bridget Anne Kelly, the former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, a Republican, said that she would strongly rebut the charges.

Perhaps they had nothing to do with the lane closings. But neither Mr. Baroni nor Ms. Kelly addressed the question of why they did not return repeated calls from the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., begging them to stop the traffic tie-ups, over three days.

That silence was a low moment. But perhaps New York hit bottom faster. Senator Skelos, the prosecutors charged, arranged to meet Long Island politicians at the wake of Wenjian Liu, a New York City police officer shot dead in December, to press for payments to the company employing his son.

Sometimes it seems as though for some people, the only thing to be ashamed of is shame itself.