Chicago leads nation in gas-price spikes

Drivers in Chicago are seeing a painful rise in gas prices get even worse this month.

The average price of regular unleaded in the Chicago metro area on Tuesday is $3.93, according to AAA. That's up 12 cents from a week ago. A month ago, the average was $3.42. Statewide, the average is about $3.79, up 8 cents from last week and 46 cents last month.

Prices are rising at pumps across the country, too, but not as dramatically. The national average is $3.60, up about 7 cents from a week ago and 30 cents higher than this time last month.

It's not typical to see gas price spikes at this time of year. Demand is typically low and picks up in the spring before driving season. And in general, gas is cheaper to produce in the winter because refineries can use less expensive blends.

The main reason for the spike is the higher price of crude oil. The price of oil has gone from around $85 a barrel in December to around $97 now because of improving economic certainty as the country moved past the election and the fiscal cliff deadline, according to energy analyst Phil Flynn. It's also being driven by better-than-expected growth in China, the world's second largest economy.

Prices in the Chicago area are typically some the highest in the nation, but the cost of a local fill-up is accelerating at almost double the national rate.

Flynn attributes this to a number of refinery issues in the region. Some scheduled maintenance at refineries -- where gasoline and other products are produced from oil -- occurred earlier than usual, which cut off some supply, affecting prices. Many close at this time of year to start the switchover to lower-emission summer blends of gasoline.

Besides a major overhaul of BP's Whiting refinery, the largest supplier of gasoline to Midwest markets, that's believed to be driving prices higher, a fire temporarily shut down a refinery in northwest Ohio.

AAA, which tracks daily gasoline prices around the country, predicts they will continue their rapid climb as local refinery issues continue into the beginning of peak driving season.

Flynn is more optimistic.

He believes that once the major Whiting refinery overhaul is complete later this year, gas prices will stabilize.

"I'm probably in the minority but I think we are starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel," he said.

sbomkamp@tribune.com | Twitter: @SamWillTravel

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Slain teen's dad: 'The healing can start' after 2 charged with murder

Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy discusses charges in the Hadiya Pendleton slaying in a news conference at Area Central police headquarters Monday evening.

Announcing charges in a case that has drawn national attention, police say 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was shot to death by two reputed gang members who were bent on retaliation for a shooting last summer and mistook the group of teens she was with for rivals.

Michael Ward, 18, and Kenneth Williams, 20, are charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder and aggravated battery with a firearm in the attack that also left two other teens wounded in Harsh Park late last month, about a mile from President Barack Obama's Kenwood home.

Ward, of the 3900 block of South Lake Park Avenue, told police the shooting was in retaliation for Williams getting wounded last July on the South Side, according to Superintendent Garry McCarthy.

Williams, of the 300 block of West 59th Street, had been shot July 11 near Pershing Road and Lake Park Avenue, police said. But he refused to sign a complaint against those suspected in the attack, McCarthy said.

Williams and Ward targeted Hadiya and other teens in the park Jan. 29 because they believed, mistakenly, they were members of the gang responsible for the shooting, he said. Ward fired the gun, police said.

Hours after Hadiya's funeral, attended by first lady Michelle Obama, police stopped Ward and Williams as they were on their way in separate cars to a friend's birthday celebration at a strip club in Harvey Saturday night, McCarthy said at a news conference at Area Central police headquarters this evening.

Hearing news of the charges, Hadiya's father Nathaniel Pendleton said this is the first time since the shooting he's had a "legitimate" smile on his face.

"I'm ecstatic that they found the two guys," he told the Tribune by phone from a Washington, D.C. restaurant, where he was with his wife, Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, and other relatives. "(I'm) thanking God that these two guys are off the streets, so that this doesn't happen to another innocent person."

Pendleton and his family were in the nation's capital to be guests of Obama during the State of the Union address Tuesday night.

Still, Pendleton said true closure won't come until the men are convicted. "Right now, I can say to you that the healing can start," he said.

Hadiya was shot in Vivian Gordon Harsh Park, about a mile north of President Barack Obama's Kenwood neighborhood home on the South Side. Her slaying took place a little more than a week after the honor student performed with the King College Prep band in Washington during inauguration festivities.

The shooting in the 4400 block of South Oakenwald Avenue happened after classes were dismissed for the day during finals week at King. Hadiya, a sophomore at King, was at the park with a group of teens, primarily other students from the school, when a gunman climbed over a fence, ran to the group and started firing, police have said.

The shooter escaped in what has been described as a white Nissan vehicle, possibly driven by a getaway driver.

While police and neighbors have generally described Harsh Park and its immediate surroundings as safe, there has been an internal gang conflict brewing in the area between factions of the Gangster Disciples, police said.

The playground where Hadiya was shot was the setting for an amateur rap video posted to YouTube. The video, which also highlights the intersection at South Oakenwald and East 44th Place, uses the moniker of a local gang in an opening credit and features a rapper shown leaving the Cook County Jail, then threatening to shoot down his foes.

The video ends at a house party with a smiling teenage girl flashing gang signs at the camera.

Ward and Williams are members of the Gangster Disciples, sources said.

Ward pleaded guilty early last year in a 2011 aggravated unlawful use of a weapon case and was given two years probation, according to court records. After an arrest on criminal trespass to a vehicle last summer, he was held without bond for a few weeks, but was released after a Sept. 9, 2012, hearing.

Williams was arrested on a misdemeanor retail theft charge in October 2011, but the charge was dismissed.

Tribune reporter Carlos Sadovi contributed to this story.

tlighty@tribune.com

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Bloomberg Lauds Companies for Cutting Salt Content

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in the midst of a long-running campaign to change the eating habits of New Yorkers and consumers across the country, declared a victory against salt on Monday, as 21 companies, from Kraft and Goya to FreshDirect, said they had met the first stage in reductions in salt content in foods.

After focusing on reducing trans fats and smoking, Mr. Bloomberg turned his attention to salt in 2010, announcing that about 30 companies had signed up to reduce salt in foods by 25 percent within five years, as a way of lowering consumers’ blood pressure and saving lives lost to heart attack and stroke.

“These companies have a huge presence on our shelves and in our diets,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference at City Hall as he announced the results, surrounded by a half-dozen executives of food companies.

The first stage focused on the low-hanging fruit — salsa, dips, bacon, ketchup, barbecue sauce, cold cuts, processed cheese, salad dressing, canned beans and pizza — foods whose salt content is so high that reducing it up to a point probably would not be noticed by many consumers.

Mr. Bloomberg called them “some of America’s most beloved and iconic foods,” suggesting that the cuts might have a disproportionately salutary effect. But Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the city’s health commissioner, said he did not know how much salt the results so far had removed from the average person’s diet.

One side effect of the salt reduction drive is that food companies are looking for salt substitutes to make food taste better.

The main way to do that is to add potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride, said Russ Moroz, vice president for research at Kraft Foods. But because potassium tends to have a bitter, mineral taste, other ingredients have to be added. He said these were proprietary secrets, and he declined to name them.

Potassium is good, Dr. Farley said, because it lowers blood pressure and most people do not get enough of it. It is removed from fruits and vegetable during processing, he said. Mr. Bloomberg said he thought fears of additives were overdone.

But a salt industry scientist said Monday that too much potassium could be bad for the kidneys, and that the “cocktail of chemical constituents” added to balance the bitterness and enhance the salty taste could present unknown risks, as those ingredients were undisclosed.

“They do it with one eye on the lab and the other eye on the label,” said Morton Satin, vice president for science and research at the Salt Institute, a trade association. “They make sure it’s below the level that the F.D.A. requires for it to be on the label.”

Mr. Satin said that the link between high blood pressure and salt was just “a theory,” and that reducing salt too much could have harmful effects, like iodine deficiency in children, a cause of mental retardation, and diabetes.

Some companies said reducing salt proved to be a popular marketing tool. Goya reported that it had reduced salt in its regular canned beans by 5 or 6 percent, without any drop in sales. “We tasted them, and you really wouldn’t notice the difference,” Joseph Perez, senior vice president of Goya Foods, said Monday.

Mr. Bloomberg said it might surprise many people to know that bread and rolls were the “biggest contributor” to salt in the diet. Eating a muffin, he said, could be worse than eating a small bag of Lays potato chips.

Bread makers are hard to spot on the list of companies that have pledged to reduce salt, perhaps, Mr. Satin said, because it is more difficult to make bread without salt. However, some companies, like Au Bon Pain, have reduced salt in some baked goods.

On an irreverent note, Mr. Bloomberg said that he loved Subway sandwiches and would eat his favorite, the Italian B.M.T. — it includes salami, pepperoni and ham — regardless of the salt content, but that he was glad that it now contained 27 percent less.

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Maker's Mark lowering proof to meet demand

Maker's Mark announced it is reducing the amount of alcohol in the spirit to keep pace with rapidly increasing consumer demand.

In an email to its fans, representatives of the brand said the entire bourbon category is "exploding" and demand for Maker's Mark is growing even faster. Some customers have even reported empty shelves in their local stores, it said.

After looking at "all possible solutions," the total alcohol by volume of Maker's Mark is being reduced by 3 percent. Representatives said the change will allow it to maintain the same taste while making sure there's "enough Maker's Mark to go around." It's working to expand its distillery and production capacity, too.

Maker's Mark, made by Deerfield-based Beam Inc., said it's done extensive testing to ensure the same taste. It says bourbon drinkers couldn't tell the difference. It also underscored the fact that nothing else in the production process has changed.

"In other words, we've made sure we didn't screw up your whisky," the note said.

Rob Samuels, chief operating officer and grandson of Maker's Mark Founder Bill Samuels, Sr., said this is a permanent decision that won’t be reversed when demand for bourbon slows down. Samuels said that bourbon has gone from the slowest growing spirits category to the fastest over the last 18 months, driven by growth overseas and demand from younger drinkers. An average bottle of Maker’s Mark takes six and half years to produce from start to finish, and since the company doesn’t buy or trade whiskey, it’s been impossible to keep up. 

The first bottle of Maker's Mark, with its signature red wax closure, was produced in 1958.

Beam is the country's second-largest spirits company by volume. It also makes Jim Beam, Sauza tequila and Pinnacle vodka. It's still dwarfed by industry-leading Diageo, the London-based maker of Smirnoff, Tanqueray, Captain Morgan and Johnnie Walker.

It's a tough time to take a risk with one of its oldest and most popular brands. Beam has promised that 25 percent of sales will come from new products, a difficult goal to attain but a critical one for investor confidence.The move met some backlash on social media sites, where some said they would boycott the bourbon if the company went ahead with its plans.

Many also complained that they'd rather see an increase in its price than a decrease in the alcohol. But observers say that by raising the price, Beam would have hurt itself by positioning Maker's Mark to compete against its own higher end brands like Basil Hayden's.

sbomkamp@tribune.com | Twitter: @SamWillTravel

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Grammy Awards: Fun. wins best song; Black Keys perform

As the 55th annual Grammy Awards neared their conclusion Sunday, the Black Keys were rolling toward a banner night. The Nashville-via-Ohio rock duo had won three Grammys, with guitarist Dan Auerbach picking up an additional award for producer of the year.

Another rock band, fun., picked up two major awards: best new artist and song of the year for “We Are Young.” In accepting the awards the band reflected on its long climb to recognition over more than a decade. “But we’re old,” they cracked.

Australian artist Gotye won record of the year for “Somebody That I Used to Know,” as well as two other awards.

Also picking up three awards in the early going were Jay-Z and Kanye West. Newcomer Frank Ocean won a pair of Grammys. And now for a few of our own award winners from the night’s nationally televised performances, speeches and other tomfoolery:

The saints go marching in: The Black Keys stormed down the streets of Treme, rocking up “Lonely Boy” with a jazz band and Dr. John in ceremonial, feathered “Night Tripper” head dress.

What, no explosions? Face it, everyone was waiting for something to blow up, a bunch of dancers in bondage gear to come strutting into view, or something equally outrageous in the middle of Rihanna’s performance. Instead the singer actually sang, and the intimacy of “Stay” made it among the night’s best and most refreshingly glitz-free performances.

Obligatory Sting sighting: The former Police singer strutted his bass during Bruno Mars’ performance. He’s not up for any awards, but as the official Grammys mascot, Prince reprised the song “Walking on the Moon,” apparently still upset it wasn’t nominated in 1980.

Revenge of the nerds: Though fun. often comes across as just another bland pop-rock band in the tradition of Train, matchbox20 and Hootie and the Blowfish, at least they have a self-deprecating sense of humor. In winning song of the year for “We are Young” over some strong competition, fun. singer Nate Ruess acknowledged, "We are not very young" and guitarist Jack Antonoff thanked "our families” who “let us live at home" for 12 years.

Best promotional plug: Justin Timberlake paved the way for his new album by fusing a ‘40s Cotton Club vibe, with the musicians and backing singers arrayed behind him on a Duke Ellington-style band stand, and then brought out Jay-Z, while channeling some Michael Jackson falsetto.

Least likely acid head: Taylor Swift got her surrealism on as she opened the broadcast by recasting her single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” as a kind of Little Bunny Foo Foo/Alice in Wonderland fantasia. Somewhere Lady Gaga was cackling. It sure put a new spin on Swift’s ultra-earnest, ultra-confessional singer-songwriter persona. Could a meat dress be next?

Country time machine: Last year it was electronic dance music, so this year the Grammys took a hard right and went for some Nashville twang as they presented a series of country entertainers. Miranda Lambert and Dierks Bentley may have been playing new tunes from their recent albums, but they weren’t that far removed from vintage ‘70s-style country-rockers.

Soul lives: Dapper Miguel, on bended kneed, crooned “Adore,” even with the distraction of Wiz Khalifa, who seemed greatly under-utilized in one of those duets-that-didn't work.

------------------------

Live Grammy Awards updates from the LA Times:

9:40 p.m. (Central time): Record of the year is Gotye's "Someboday That I Used to Know" featuring Kimbra.

9:39 p.m.: Hunter Hayes, proof that being cute and young doesn’t mean you can sing. Moving on. 

9:38 p.m.: The Lumineers write every song as a crowd sing-along, and its breakout hit, “Ho Hey,” is no different. The new artist contenders were one of the year’s bigger success stories. Singer Wesley Schultz likes to stalk the crowd as he sings, and here he was confined to the stage, but the band’s communal effect was evident. Its success was definitely foretold by Mumford & Sons, but I find the Lumineers less insistent in their arena-folk.

The Lumineers had the honor of introducing Jack White, whose “Blunderbuss” is up for album of the year. White’s “Blunderbuss,” with only 466,000 copies sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan, is actually the lowest-selling album of the year contender this year. It deserves a wider audience than that, as it’s a scattershot collection that touches on all facets of rock ‘n’ blues history. White offered two drastically different takes here tonight -- the more melodic “Love Interruption” and the vicious “Freedom at 21” --  complete with two different bands.

Then the big upset happened. Pep-rally pop band Fun. took best new artist, besting local R&B artist Frank Ocean. With Ocean having been one of the year’s biggest stories (covered earlier in this post), he seemed like a lock for new artist, yet Fun., buoyed by its massive hit “We Are Young,” took the prize. 

"I didn’t think we were going to win this one, gotta be honest,” said singer Nate Ruess, as the camera showed a stoic Ocean. Then Ruess made it clear he hadn’t done any prep in case his band won. “I gotta pee so bad,” he said.

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For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

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Is Southwest Airlines losing the love?

Southwest Airlines' reputation as an industry maverick seems to be going the way of flight attendants in hot pants and $20 one-way fares.

The nation's largest domestic carrier just marked its 40th straight profitable year, an unmatched feat in a time of economic turbulence, fluctuating fuel prices and airline bankruptcies. It did so by undercutting the competition with no-frills flights and, in the process, building an army of budget-minded fans.

Now many of those longtime customers say the Dallas-based carrier that calls itself LUV airlines has been losing their love since it recently began to shift its focus away from low fares and friendly service toward swelling its bottom line.

Among the changes that critics say show Southwest's new profit-boosting attitude: It cut the legroom on many planes to fit more seats, retooled its frequent flier program to make passengers spend more money to collect points and adopted new fees to board early.

"Southwest used to be a great airline," said Lance Malkind, a semi-retired consulting actuary from Phoenix, who has been flying Southwest for 33 years. "The fares were reasonable, onboard service was excellent, and the frequent flier plan was simple and very good. Now the fares are no longer that good compared to other airlines, and the frequent flier plan has gone from being one of the best to one of the worst."

Southwest is still the country's only major airline to waive fees for the first two checked bags. It also ranks high in on-time performance. But even airline officials conceded that Southwest had to find new ways to make money to compete.

"Yes, we have to keep up with the times and, yes, we have to change," said Whitney Eichinger, a spokeswoman for the airline. "But the truth is that Southwest remains a maverick in the industry."

Many of the new fees adopted in the last couple of years are for optional services, such as early boarding and wireless Internet access, she said. But what has long been included in the price of the fare — two checked bags, snacks and drinks — remains free, Eichinger added.

"If we were charging for peanuts, that is something that our customers would find outrageous," she said.

Because Southwest has forgone millions of dollars in revenue from baggage fees, analysts say, it was no surprise that the airline would look for other ways to generate extra cash to offset rising labor and fuel costs.

"Southwest is in the middle between customers who are very sensitive to higher fares and investors, on the other hand, complaining that the airline is not doing enough," said Seth Kaplan, a managing partner at Airlines Weekly, a trade publication.

With the economy rebounding and demand for air travel still relatively strong, airline industry experts say now is the best time for Southwest to test new moneymaking ideas without risking the loss of too many loyal fans.

"I'm not surprised by this," said Betsy Snyder, an analyst with Standard & Poor's. "They want to increase their profits and this is the way to do it. They could lose passengers, but in some markets what's the option? Do other airlines offer anything better?"

Southwest was born in 1971, serving Dallas, Houston and San Antonio with three Boeing 737s — a plane that still represents nearly 90% of its fleet. It made its headquarters at Dallas' Love Field, which later earned it the stock symbol LUV.

The airline took to the air amid tough competition from now-defunct Braniff and Texas International and fought back by offering free bottles of liquor and half-price fares for overnight flights.

Almost from the beginning, Southwest has pushed its niche — low fares but no extra frills like seat assignments, in-flight meals or roomy first-class seats. The hot-pants uniforms worn by flight attendants in the 1970s were replaced with shorts and pants in the '80s.

Southwest enjoyed its best years in the late 1990s when it saved millions of dollars with fuel hedging contracts that enabled the airline to buy fuel at a fixed price to avoid the exposure of price fluctuations. But the hedging advantage ended around 2008 when fuel prices dropped.

As the Great Recession took hold, most other airlines added baggage fees to boost revenue. Southwest, instead, broke from the trend and adopted a "bags fly free" policy. JetBlue is the only other airline to waive fees for the first checked bag, but it doesn't for the second.

Southwest officials said the bags-fly-free policy is probably responsible for increasing Southwest's market share about 2% since 2008 and generates up to $1 billion annually.

To further expand its customer base, Southwest announced a $1.4-billion deal in 2010 to acquire Orlando, Fla.-based AirTran Airways.

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FBI: Elderly man robs Niles bank

Suspect in the robbery of a Niles bank. (FBI / February 9, 2013)

Staff report

9:53 p.m. CST, February 9, 2013

A man the FBI said appeared to be in his 70s and walking with a cane robbed a bank this morning in north suburban Niles.

A man who is estimated to be in his 70s robbed the Harris Bank branch at 7077 W. Dempster St. at 9:45 a.m., according to FBI spokesman Joan Hyde.

The robber was wearing a brown coat and walked with a cane during the incident, she said.

He displayed a weapon during the robbery, but no one was hurt, according to Hyde.

Niles police were not available immediately. 

chicagobreaking@tribune.com

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For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

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The fine line between legitimate businesses and pyramid schemes

Controversy is again casting a shadow over the multilevel marketing industry, as nutritional supplement company Herbalife Inc., which has thousands of distributors in the Chicago region, has been publicly called a pyramid scheme by a prominent investor — an allegation the company vigorously denies.

Meanwhile, a different multilevel marketer, Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing, was shut down in recent weeks after a lawsuit was brought by regulators and several states, including Illinois, alleging the company scammed consumers out of $169 million. The scheme affected an estimated 100,000 Americans, including some in Chicago, where it targeted Spanish-speaking consumers, the Federal Trade Commission alleged.

Most people outside the industry might have only a vague notion about multilevel marketing, also called network marketing and direct selling. It often involves personal sales of cosmetics, wellness products or home decor items — or as critics flippantly call it, "pills, potions and lotions" — usually sold through product parties hosted by friends or relatives.

For sellers, the companies offer the appeal of starting a business on the cheap with little training, working from home and being their own boss, if only for part-time money. Some might recruit friends and family to become sellers, which augments their own commissions and gives them a shot at the six-figure compensation many such marketing companies tout but few distributors attain.

The largest multilevel marketing companies, often known as MLMs, are household names: Avon, Mary Kay, Pampered Chef and Amway. MLMs have annual sales of about $30 billion, with about 16 million people in the United States selling their products, according to the industry group Direct Selling Association, which represents these firms and others.

The recent controversies might raise the question: What's the difference between a legitimate multilevel marketing company and an illegal pyramid scheme, in which only people who get in first — at the top of the pyramid-like structure — make money and everyone else is a dupe?

The harshest critics maintain there is no difference, that there's no such thing as a legitimate MLM and that the industry's secrets stay safe because of a cultlike mentality and a blind eye of regulators.

Jon M. Taylor, who was once a seller for an MLM company, said he has studied the industry for 18 years and analyzed more than 500 MLM companies. He maintains the website MLM-thetruth.com and offers a free e-book there.

"I have not yet found a good MLM — a good MLM is an oxymoron," Taylor said.

He said all MLM companies have the same flaw: They depend on endless chains of recruiting new members.  "There is no more unfair and deceptive practice than multilevel marketing," Taylor said.

Tracy Coenen, a forensic accountant and fraud investigator with Sequence Inc. in Chicago and Milwaukee, is author of the Fraud Files Blog. She is also a critic.

"Multilevel marketing companies are pyramid schemes that the government allows to operate," said Coenen. "The only difference is that Herbalife, or any multilevel marketing company, has a tangible product that they use to make their pyramid appear legitimate."

The Direct Selling Association says MLMs are legitimate businesses, and that the group has about 200 members carefully screened by the organization to ensure they are not pyramid schemes and don't use deceptive practices.

The Federal Trade Commission agrees there are legitimate MLMs. The difference between a legitimate business and pyramid scheme comes down to products.

If the company and its distributors make money primarily from the sale of products to end-users (and not boxes of product accumulating in a distributor's garage), it's OK.

By contrast, a pyramid scheme compensates those at the top of the pyramid with participation fees paid by those recruited at the bottom. It eventually collapses when the scheme can't recruit more people.

But identifying a pyramid scheme can be difficult because MLMs typically have product sales, along with recruitment fees and recruitment incentives.

"It gets cloudy when you have a situation where you have fees being paid for both," said Monica Vaca, assistant director of the FTC's division of marketing practices. "It's very nuanced."

While prosecuting an MLM can seem somewhat of a judgment call, cases have a common factor: deceptive promises about how much money distributors will earn, Vaca said.

In the Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing case filed last month, C. Steven Baker, director of the FTC's Midwest region, said, "These defendants were promising people that if they worked hard they could make lots of money. But it was a rigged game, and the vast majority of people lost money."

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