MODESTO, Calif. — Distraught over her 17-year-old son's rebellious attitude and drug use, Rebecca Humble, a single mother from San Diego, began looking for an outdoor therapy program for him. Finding a magazine advertisement for the Pacific Coast Academy, she called and reached the marketing consultant, "Stephen Michaels."
Michaels, she recalled, told her that her son would receive proper care as well as stern discipline at the academy's camp on the South Pacific island of Samoa. Convinced by his promises, Humble enrolled her son, Christopher, in a one-year program for $20,000.
Christopher lasted six months. When he returned home in December 1999, Humble said, his weight had dropped from 165 to 118 pounds; he had scars on his back from beatings; and he could barely walk or talk.
Humble soon learned that Stephen Michaels was really former Utah wilderness camp director Stephen A. Cartisano III, one of the best-known figures in the therapy camp business, an industry that has grown from just a few operations 20 years ago to several hundred. Many of them like Pacific Coast use rugged outdoor settings to shock teenagers out of bad habits and bad behavior.
But as the programs have grown in number so have accusations from campers that they have been physically abused, denied food and medication and placed in the control of counselors who have little or no training for the special needs of troubled children.
And over the years, no one has faced more accusations than Cartisano.
During his 12 years as an owner or employee of programs in Utah, Hawaii, the Caribbean and now Samoa, he has been the subject of accusations of abuse or fraud at every camp where he has worked, so often, he said in an interview here, that he began using aliases "just to stay in business and feed my family."
In fact, Cartisano has never been convicted of a crime arising out of activities at his camps. Through his years, he has settled numerous lawsuits out of court but in general has suffered little more than the wrath of angry parents like Humble who believe they were deceived and cheated out of huge payments. While none of them accuse Cartisano himself of meting out physical punishment, they blame him for assuring parents that their children were entering a safe program, run by qualified people, and looking the other way when harsh treatment was used.
At Cartisano's latest venture, the 3-year-old program in Samoa, which is owned by two Americans, more than a dozen American children recently complained of physical abuse and 23 of them quit the program. In addition, the father of one teenager said his son was sexually molested by several camp counselors.
The camp, which is still operating, is being investigated by Samoan authorities "for a number of allegations of assaults and harsh treatment of students," said Asi Blakelock, the police commissioner. Some of the youths were placed in the protective custody of the U.S. Embassy until their parents could arrange for them to fly home.
According to Cartisano, 45, a charismatic and articulate father of four who once studied to become an actor, the accusations relating to the camp in Samoa, as well as those everywhere else he has worked, are entirely false.
In two recent interviews here, he insisted that every accusation of abuse had been fueled by manipulative, deceitful youths who invented stories to escape the rigors of a program that places heavy emphasis on work details and militaristic discipline.
That includes claims of Christopher Humble, he said, insisting that Christopher lost weight because he refused to eat and suffered scars after an accidental fall. In addition, Cartisano produced an evaluation sheet that Humble completed before Christopher was sent to Samoa in which she described her son as a habitual liar.
He also said that some of the accusations against him were concocted by venal parents who "simply want refunds" of annual tuition costs that reach $30,000 and more.
Cartisano says he firmly believes that he — not the parents or their children — is the real victim, the result of a long and vengeful campaign arising out of one fatal event 11 years ago at a program he ran in southern Utah known as Challenger II: Kristen Chase, a 16-year-old girl from Florida, died of heat stroke after a long hike.
The authorities in Kane County charged Cartisano and the program with two counts of negligent homicide and nine counts of child abuse. After two trials, the first ending in a mistrial, a jury acquitted him of all charges.
Nonetheless, Cartisano said, Kristen's death, combined with the deaths in Utah of two other teenagers, Michelle Sutton six weeks earlier and Aaron Bacon in 1994, at programs run by former employees of Cartisano "made me a wonderful target" for accusations that have continued for nearly a decade.
"Even though I was acquitted," he said, "people had everything they needed to start tearing my programs down."
At the very least, the deaths in Utah raised Cartisano's profile and alarmed local authorities wherever he went later. Camps he set up in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Costa Rica were all shut down by the local authorities over licensing violations, and children returned home, saying they had been physically abused by camp personnel or that the camps provided inadequate medical treatment.
The authorities in Utah revoked his license to operate in 1990 and despite his acquittal he was banned from ever working with child treatment programs in the state. Later in 1990, after officials in Hawaii found him operating an unlicensed camp on the island of Molokai, a judge barred him from operating a camp anywhere in Hawaii.
Thomas D. Farrell, the deputy district attorney who sought the injunction to close down the operation in Hawaii, said he interviewed the children who were removed from the Molokai program, and "every damn one of them," he said, told officials that camp counselors physically abused them.
In May 1993, the authorities on St. John's in the Virgin Islands discovered Cartisano running a program without a license and closed it down. Months later in Costa Rica, two boys told the authorities there they had been abused and imprisoned in another Cartisano camp.
The following year, Puerto Rican officials found five boys bound in ropes in the back of a car and learned they had been attending a program run by Cartisano and were left there by camp counselors. The local district attorney filed charges of child abuse and operating without a license, but the camp closed before papers could be
served.
To critics of Cartisano, including parents of children who attended his camps, prosecutors and investigators, the steady stream of accusations is too much of a coincidence to dismiss as the result of one fatality. They contend that Cartisano is a liar who exploits desperate parents and their troubled children.
Cartisano "preys upon parents in need and fashions his responses to whatever they want to hear," said Pamela Elliott, who asserted that her son, Chase, was beaten and denied proper medical treatment in Samoa. "He only cares that the camp gets its money, regardless of any consequences suffered by the children."
Monique Stream of Tacoma, Wash., said her son Curtis, 16, was beaten at the Samoa camp and kept in isolation for several weeks. She said, "I am willing to do what I can to put Cartisano out of business. As far as I'm concerned, he should be listed on Interpol."
Maxwell V. Jackson, chief of police in Harrisville, Utah, who was sheriff of Kane County when he investigated the death of Kristen Chase, said: "Cartisano is suave, smooth and handsome with a real good line, but he's just a bad guy. He is completely devoid of conscience. He has no ability to feel bad for hurting people. Whatever's good for him, that's the way he leans."
Hearing those characterizations, Cartisano shook his head. He said of the 1,200 children who attended his camps over the years, the parents of only a small number, perhaps 25, were complaining. He offered a reporter a list of parents who would say their children benefited from his programs. Several telephone calls confirmed that.
"Did we make mistakes? Yes, we made mistakes," Cartisano said, insisting that camp employees who violated camp procedures were always dismissed. In nearly three hours of conversation, that was his only admission of error or misjudgment.
As for accusations of abuse: "All of them are unfounded," he said. "All of them. Exaggerations. It never happened. These kids were no angels to begin with, and they would say anything to get sent home."
Ken Stettler, an official with the Utah Department of Human Services who helped draft state regulations for wilderness camps after the three children died, said Cartisano's operations had in some ways been shielded from scrutiny and potential lawsuits because most states, let alone other countries, do not have child abuse laws that apply directly to loosely run outdoor programs operating miles from anywhere. Also many camps, including Pacific Coast, require parents to sign forms that give counselors permission "to discipline" their children, which would make any form of punishment difficult to attack in court.
And finally, he said, plaintiffs in a lawsuit would have to rely upon testimony of children whose dubious behavior and backgrounds would easily call their credibility into question.
"Cartisano knows all this," Stettler said.
Still, dozens of children, like Josh Forman, 16, of San Diego, have left Cartisano camps describing the same kinds of harsh treatment. Josh, who spent six weeks in Samoa this year before his mother pulled him out, recalled one girl who was tied to a post for three days as punishment, an episode Elliott's son, Chase, recalled, as well.
And both boys said campers were routinely denied basic necessities, like medical care and mosquito nets when they were placed in "isolation" as a form of punishment. "I feel like that was abuse," Josh said.
A former camp employee who asked not to be identified said, "There was true abuse of the students there," mostly by Samoan staff members.
Parents also accuse Cartisano of hiring counselors with little or no training in education, psychology or sociology.
"Someone has to stop this guy," said Cathy Sutton, the mother of Michelle Sutton, who has become one of the leading advocates for federal legislation to govern boot-camp style programs. "Parents have to know about him."
Cartisano grew up in Modesto, the son of a heroin addict who died in a car accident when he was 17 and a hot-tempered father who worked as a cement contractor.
After high school and junior college here, he attended Brigham Young University but never graduated. As part of one course, he worked in a wilderness program and became interested in camping as spiritual and religious therapy.
The Utah program, his first, opened in 1988. A year later, he conceded in a television interview broadcast in Salt Lake City that some of the techniques he used were harsh — but necessary, given the attitudes of children whose problems often involved drugs, alcohol and poor self-esteem.
"We are breaking down facades," he said, explaining his philosophy at Challenger II, which was replicated elsewhere. "Kids come in with all sorts of little ways to manipulate, with a lot of anger. We physically stress them out, and that breaks down the facades to get to their heart."
Thirteen years later, it is a philosophy, he said, he still embraces although it might be some time before he can apply it again.
Cartisano, who has been visiting his son, David, in Modesto, said he was planning to return home shortly to his wife and other children in Oklahoma City. For now, he said, he has no interest in working for another camp. "I need a break," he said.