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Late Edition

By ALEXANDRA ALTEROn a recent Friday night, Tyler

Knott Gregson, a blond, tattooedpoet from Montana, took thestage at a Manhattan bookstoreand beamed at the crowd thathad come to celebrate his newhaiku collection.

“This is rad. I appreciate it,” hesaid, taking in the roughly 150people who had crowded intoBarnes & Noble. The responsefrom the mostly young, mostly fe-male audience amounted to a col-lective swoon.

Seven years ago, Mr. Gregson,34, was scraping by as a freelancecopywriter, churning out descrip-tions of exercise equipment, hairproducts and medical imagingdevices. Now, thanks to his560,000 Instagram and Tumblrfollowers, he has become the lit-erary equivalent of a unicorn: abest-selling celebrity poet.

Mr. Gregson belongs to a newgeneration of young, digitally as-tute poets whose loyal online fol-lowings have helped catapultthem onto the best-seller lists,where poetry books are scarce.These amateur poets are not win-

ning literary awards, and mosthave never been in a graduatewriting workshop.

Instead, their appeal lies in theunpolished flavor of their verses,which often read as if they wereripped from the pages of a diary.And their poems are reachinghundreds of thousands of read-ers, attracting the attention of lit-erary agents, editors and pub-lishers, and overturning poetry’slongstanding reputation as a loftyart form with limited popular ap-peal.

The rapid rise of Instapoetsprobably will not shake up the lit-erary establishment, and theirwriting is unlikely to impress lit-erary critics or purists who mightsneer at conflating clicks with ar-tistic quality. But they could re-shape the lingering perception ofpoetry as a creative medium indecline.

Mr. Gregson’s first poetrybook, “Chasers of the Light,” be-came a national best seller andhas more than 120,000 copies in

Web Poets’ Society: New Breed

Succeeds in Taking Verse Viral

Continued on Page 17

Barbara Broccoli and her half brother,Michael G. Wilson, have controlledBond’s every move for 20 years. Now, abattle over his next studio home. PAGE 1

SUNDAY BUSINESS

James Bond’s Secret Agents

VOL. CLXV . . . No. 57,044 © 2015 The New York Times NEW YORK, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2015

By ERIC SCHMITT and MICHAEL R. GORDON

AL UDEID AIR BASE, Qatar— As the United States preparesto intensify airstrikes against theIslamic State in Syria, the Araballies who with great fanfare sentwarplanes on the initial missionsthere a year ago have largelyvanished from the campaign.

The Obama administrationheralded the Arab air forces fly-ing side by side with Americanfighter jets in the campaign’s ear-ly days as an important show ofsolidarity against the IslamicState, also known as ISIS orDaesh. Top commanders likeGen. Lloyd J. Austin III, whooversees operations in Syria andIraq, still laud the Arab countries’contributions to the fight. But asthe United States enters a criticalphase of the war in Syria, or-dering Special Operations troopsto support rebel forces and send-ing two dozen attack planes toTurkey, the air campaign hasevolved into a largely Americaneffort.

Administration officials hadsought to avoid the appearance ofanother American-dominatedwar, even as most leaders in thePersian Gulf seem more preoccu-pied with supporting rebels fight-ing the government of PresidentBashar al-Assad of Syria. Now,some of those officials note withresignation, the Arab partnershave quietly left the UnitedStates to run the bulk of the airwar in Syria — not the first timeWashington has found allieswanting.

Saudi Arabia and the UnitedArab Emirates have shifted mostof their aircraft to their fightagainst Iranian-backed Houthirebels in Yemen. Jordan, reactingto the grisly execution of one of

AS U.S. ESCALATESAIR WAR ON ISIS,ALLIES FADE AWAY

ARABS SHIFT CAMPAIGNS

Partners Slow Strikes in

Syria as Attention

Turns Elsewhere

Continued on Page 4

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

LOUISVILLE, Miss. — In sin-gle strokes after the massacre ofnine black churchgoers inCharleston in June, Confederatebattle flags were taken fromstatehouse grounds in South Car-olina and Alabama, pulled fromshelves at major retailers likeWalmart and declared unwel-come, if to limited effect, at Nas-car races.

What happened so swiftly else-where is not so simple in Mis-sissippi. The Confederate battleflag is not simply flying in onehotly disputed spot at the StateCapitol but occupying the upperleft corner of the state flag, whichhas been flying since 1894. And asrecently as 2001, Mississippiansvoted by a nearly two-to-one ra-tio to keep it. Recent polling sug-gests the majority have notchanged their minds.

“My flag’s been flying for 33years, and I’m not about to take itdown,” said Nancy Jenkins, 58, apostal worker who is white andwho flies the Mississippi flag andthe United States flag at herhouse a block south of LouisvilleCity Hall. “It doesn’t stand forhate. It means a lot of peoplefought and died.”

Over the past few months,there have been scattered out-breaks of municipal defiance bythose who find the Confederateflag offensive, as mayors and citycouncils from the Delta to thePine Belt have decided to nolonger fly the state flag.

But beyond these sporadic ges-tures, any organized effort wasalways going to wait until poli-ticians were on the safe side of

Continued on Page 16

Flag ProtestersSet Their SightsOn Mississippi

Fighting Its Banner’s

Confederate Image

By STEPHANIE SAUL

Partially paralyzed and reliant on awheelchair, Ozella Campbell spends a lotof time watching television. It was underthose circumstances in February 2014 thatshe saw a commercial urging her to callMyHouseIsADump.com, a company thatoffered to buy houses in as-is condition, incash, and to close the purchase within sev-en days.

She called the toll-free number andwithin hours, she said, a well-spokenyoung man appeared at her brownstone, alongtime family home in Bedford-Stuyve-sant, a Brooklyn neighborhood in thethroes of transformation.

The next day, the man’s associate ar-rived.

“He said, ‘You don’t have to pay anymore bills,’” said Ms. Campbell, who was$1,000 behind on her electric bill at thetime.

A third man, named Alex, ostensibly theboss, arrived next. He promised, Ms.Campbell said, to pay her delinquent mort-gage, provide for her housing for twoyears, and pay her $43,800. He also hired alawyer for her. All she had to do was signover the deed to her house.

More than a year later, Ms. Campbell,75, is in limbo. Her former home at 679 Jef-ferson Avenue is owned by an entity calledJefferson Holding LLC and she is left withher delinquent $529,000 mortgage.

“He lied,” she said tearfully of Alex in aninterview at an illegally converted garagein Canarsie, Brooklyn, where she lives for

now. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, Mrs. Camp-bell; we’re going to take care of you.’”

Ms. Campbell never learned Alex’s sur-name. And when her relatives tried to findJefferson Holding LLC at its Great Neck,N.Y., address, there was no company thereby that name.

In Bedford-Stuyvesant and other pock-ets of the city, white-collar criminals areemploying a variety of schemes to snatchproperties from their owners. Often, theyuse the secrecy afforded to shell compa-nies to rent out vacated homes until theyare caught or sell them to third parties.Victims are left groping for redress, un-able to identify their predators or even, insome cases, to prove a crime has been

In the Shadows, Stealing Homes

Deed Thieves Hide Behind Shell Companies to Bilk the Vulnerable

Continued on Page 22

SASHA MASLOV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Susan Green on the stoop of the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, rowhouse she says she lost in a fraudulent deed transfer.

This article is by KareemFahim, David D. Kirkpatrick andNicola Clark.

SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt —The airport is surrounded by awall topped with barbed wire.Armed sentries are stationed atits entrance, and passengers pass

through two security screeningsbefore reaching departure gates;before a recent flight, there wereno fewer than eight uniformedguards standing around thecheckpoint.

But potential inconsistencies inairport security here and else-where in Egypt have never beenhard to detect. As guards at a

metal detector here forced a de-parting passenger recently tothrow out a pack of safety razorsfound in his luggage, an airportcafe worker breezed past thecheckpoint without any search orinspection. At the Cairo airporton Friday, an officer at an X-raymachine sent text messageswhile he was scanning luggage.Another guard took a passengerat his word when he said thephone in his pocket had caused ametal detector to beep.

Those potential gaps are nowunder a spotlight, as preliminaryevidence from the crash of a Rus-sian charter jet on Oct. 31 pointsto the possibility of a bombing,and several countries have re-stricted flights to and fromSharm el Sheikh. Theories abouthow a bomb might have gottenonto the plane, whose passengersand crew were all from Russia orits neighboring countries, havefocused on the possibility that anairport worker might have beeninvolved.

Ayman al-Muqaddam, theEgyptian official leading themultinational committee investi-gating the crash, confirmed somedetails about the flight at a newsconference in Cairo on Saturday,

Gaps in Egypt Airport Security Face Scrutiny

AHMED ABD EL-LATIF/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tourists walked toward the Sharm el Sheikh airport in Egypt. Continued on Page 12

After a childhood spent shuffling be-tween relatives and foster homes, a Jetsrookie experienced an emotional familyreunion in Oakland last weekend. PAGE 1

SPORTSSUNDAY

Everyone’s Son

U(D547FD)v+[!,!/!=!,Gail Collins PAGE 1

SUNDAY REVIEW

This weekend, The Times offers its firstvirtual reality film with a report on theglobal refugee crisis. Home deliverysubscribers received a VR viewer.

THE MAGAZINE

A New Way of Telling Stories

By MICHAEL BARBARO

“I only tell true stories,” CarlyFiorina assured employees dur-ing one of her first speeches asthe chief executive of Hewlett-Packard in 2000.

But the stirring story that Mrs.Fiorina, now aRepublican can-didate for presi-dent, told thatday about thecreation of HPand its first prod-uct, had a glaringproblem: It wasalmost entirelyinaccurate, ac-cording to an in-

ternal transcript, an oral historyof HP, a book and a company his-torian.

In the end, it may not matter.In the 2016 presidential cam-

paign, the truth is starting to lookdeeply out of fashion.

Donald J. Trump has brazenlydenied calling Senator Marco Ru-bio the “personal senator” ofFacebook’s founder, Mark Zuck-erberg — even though the quotewas published on Mr. Trump’scampaign website.

Hillary Rodham Clinton hassaid that all of her grandparentswere immigrants, even thoughher paternal grandmother wasborn in Pennsylvania.

Now it is Ben Carson who ap-pears to have shaded the facts,

Candidates

Stick to Script,

If Not the Truth

Continued on Page 20

Ben Carson

Marco Rubio released two years ofAmerican Express charges, hoping toquiet accusations he used G.O.P. moneyfor personal expenses. PAGE 20

NATIONAL 14-25

Rubio Bares Financial Data

C M Y K Nxxx,2015-11-08,A,001,Bs-BK,E2