Wall Street’s monu-
ment to bullishness
began as a lark.
After the Black
Monday stock market crash
of 1987, Sicilian-born sculptor
Arturo Di Modica spent two years
and $325,000 of his own money
crafting a 3.5-ton bronze beast
intended to lift traders’ spirits.
In the dead of night on Dec. 15,
1989, Di Modica used a truck,
a crane, and 40 friends to sneak Charging Bull
outside the New York Stock Exchange. To their
surprise, a huge Christmas tree had been erected
where Di Modica planned to place his animal.
“Drop the bull under the tree,” he shouted.
“It’s my gift.” The rogue sculpture was eventu-
ally granted permanent legal residence in Lower
Manhattan, becoming a tourist draw and a totem
of American capitalism. Di Modica was miffed.
It was meant as “a joke, a provocation,” he said.
“Instead, it became a cursedly serious thing.”
Di Modica was born “in the Sicilian town of
Vittoria” to a homemaker mother and a grocer
father, said The New York Times. Against his
parents’ objections, he left home at age 19 to
study sculpture in Florence. “He was so poor that
he couldn’t afford to use a foundry or even buy
metal working tools, so he fabricated his own.”
By the late 1960s, he was working with Carraramarble and earning acclaim
for his abstract work, said
Artforum .com—the English
sculptor Henry Moore nick-
named Di Modica “young
Michelangelo.” In 1970, he
moved to New York City but
struggled to win attention.
His first major show, in 1977,
failed to attract a single critic,
so a peeved Di Modica trucked
his eight enormous marble
sculptures uptown, depositing them outside
Rockefeller Center. He pulled a similar stunt at
Lincoln Center on Valentine’s Day 1985, leaving
a horse underneath a red blanket on which he’d
written “Be My Valentine N.Y. Love AD.”
The New York Stock Exchange had Charging
Bull removed and impounded, said ArtNet.com.
But after Di Modica paid a $500 fine, the city’s
Parks Department stepped up to offer his statue
a home nearby in the Financial District. “The
piece was back in the headlines in 2017” when
artist Kristen Visbal placed a bronze, ponytailed
Fearless Girl opposite the bull. Di Modica was
offended, saying the metal child had “recast his
beloved bull as, well, a bully.” He labored recently
on two 40-foot stallions, part of a 132-foot-high
work that Di Modica dreamed would straddle a
river in his hometown of Vittoria. “I must finish
this thing,” he said. “I will die working.”Dianna Ortiz lived two
lives, one before her
abduction, and one after.
In the late 1980s, the
American nun was teaching indigenous
children in the highlands of Guatemala,
amid a brutal civil war that pitted left-
ist rebels against the U.S.-backed mili-
tary. For years, the Catholic missionary
ignored menacing letters warning her
to leave the country. Then on Nov. 2,
1989, she was kidnapped by Guatemalan security
forces, gang-raped, burned with cigarettes, forced
to stab to death a fellow captive, and dangled by
her wrists over a pit filled with rats and decompos-
ing bodies. The ordeal ended, Ortiz said, when an
American man arrived and ordered her torturers to
stop, saying her disappearance had sparked media
attention. When he drove her away, she escaped
from his car. Back in America, Ortiz embarked
on a yearslong campaign to declassify documents
detailing U.S. involvement in human rights abuses
in Guatemala. “No one ever fully recovers” from
torture, she wrote in a 2002 memoir. “Not the one
who is tortured, and not the one who tortures.”Ortiz grew up in Grants, N.M., said The Wash-
ing ton Post, “one of eight children” born to a ura-nium miner and a homemaker.
She was drawn to a religious
life from a young age, and in
1977 she “entered the Ursuline
novitiate at Mount Saint Joseph
in Maple Mount, Ky.,” while
also pursuing an education
degree. After graduating, Sister
Ortiz taught at Catholic schools
in western Kentucky, said the
Owensboro, Ky., Messenger-
Inquirer. In 1987, she left for Guatemala.Ortiz returned “confused and distraught,” said
The New York Times, and began “years of exten-
sive therapy.” Documents she worked to declas-
sify detailed “acts of genocide” by U.S.-backed
forces, and through efforts including a hunger
strike near the White House, her case “became
part of a sweeping review” of U.S. covert action
in Guatemala. In 1994 she moved to Washington,
D.C., to work for the Guatemala Human Rights
Commission; four years later, she helped found
the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support
Coalition, and spent a decade as its head. As a
devout Christian, Ortiz wrestled with forgiveness.
“I leave that in God’s hands,” she said in 1996.
“I’m not sure what it means to forgive.”Obituaries
Dianna
Ortiz
1958–2021Ge
tty,
Ju
an
a^ A
rias
/W
ash
ing
ton
Po
st
The Sicilian sculptor who put a bull on Wall Street
The nun who became an anti-torture campaigner
Arturo Di
Modica
1941–2021 In 1963, the Dominican-born
bandleader Johnny Pacheco
jumped into business with
the attorney handling his
divorce: Jerry Masucci,
an Italian-
American
ex-cop with a
love for Cuban
dance music.
The pair founded Fania Rec-
ords, with Pacheco as the
label’s chief producer and tal-
ent scout, and started selling
LPs from the trunks of their
cars in Spanish Harlem. By
the 1970s, Fania was being
hailed as the Latin Motown,
home to superstars such as
Celia Cruz, Héctor Lavoe,
and Rubén Blades and the
breeding ground of salsa,
a distinctly New York blend
of Cuban mambo, Puerto
Rican bomba, Domin i can
merengue, and Amer i can
jazz and funk. The lyrics of
the songs—many written
by Pacheco—often tackled
weighty subjects such as
racism and cultural pride,
but the music never lost its
propulsive rhythm. “Our only
goal,” Pacheco said, “was to
make people dance.”
Born in Santiago de los
Caballeros in the Dominican
Republic, Pacheco moved
with his family “to New York
when he was 11 years old,”
said Billboard. A precocious
talent, he studied percussion
at the Juilliard School and
worked in Latin bands before
starting his own hit outfit,
Pacheco y Su Charanga. At
Fania, he organized his label’s
top talent for blockbuster con-
certs. In 1973, the Fania All
Stars played to 44,000 people
at Yankee Stadium, with
Pacheco—his rhinestone-
covered white shirt drenched
in sweat— leading the audi-
ence into a musical frenzy.
Fania collapsed in the mid-
1980s amid a bitter dispute
between Pacheco and
Masucci “over unpaid royal-
ties,” said The Washington
Post. Always energetic,
Pacheco kept performing and
writing into his 80s. His tomb-
stone, he said, should read
“Here lies Johnny Pacheco,
against his will.”Johnny
Pacheco
1935–202139
The godfather of salsa
who got the world
dancing to a Latin beat