Who Was Haroon Paryani?
Neither the ad nor the Web site mentions Jackson or drops a hint as to who’s behind the campaign. Jackson’s life partner, John Castronovo, told me the Web site “is a collaborative effort of the friends of Mike Jackson, a group of over a dozen.” When I asked if he was part of the group, Castronovo replied, “I’m a friend of Mike Jackson.”
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I passed along that comparison between Paryani and Shepard, the gay college student who was robbed and beaten in Wyoming in 1998 and left tied to a fence to die. (His two killers were sentenced to life without parole.)
He faxed me the column, which ran in the Tribune on December 6, 1989.
“That’s where all this is coming from,” said Breen. “In fact, people were originally telling us that this guy had been very mean to several other customers.” Breen’s job is to save his client, which means giving a jury reason to believe that whatever Jackson did, he was provoked. Breen said he hadn’t seen the Web site and had nothing to do with it, but he won’t ignore what turns up: “I’m interested if there are any leads, but I’m doing a more traditional investigation.”
Jones wrote a critical essay about The Pain and the Itch for the July 24 Tribune. He fretted beforehand. A lot of people he respected had seen the play and had no problem with it. He realized that just a month earlier he’d written a piece accusing Steppenwolf of getting stodgy on its main stage while Red Light Winter in the Garage Theatre offered not only characters who were “young and live on the edge” but the “unmistakable whiff of danger.” So here he was attacking the dangerous show Steppenwolf had just opened on the main stage–as if any theater that lives on the edge won’t go over it once in a while. Jones believed he had something to say that was valid, but it was only an argument, not a cause. As he told me later, “It wasn’t really my intention to sort of change anything.”
