A lavish lifestyle strains credibility (1985)
chicagotribune.com
chicagotribune.com
His name comes up only once after the 80's in relation to a court case involving his son and wife in 1998:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240129182146/https://casetext....
Some additional links for the curious:
https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/19850712_IB85067_4a31a9...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1985/12/04/from-general-dynam...
https://magazines.marinelink.com/Magazines/MaritimeReporter/...
Thank you so much for looking!
The book I read of his was "The Art of the Steal", and it wasn't really about his personal history, more about his work as an anti-fraud consultant drawing from real-world cases.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138841.The_Art_of_the_St...
I have seen banks get taken by people and just sweep shit under the rug.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/how-to-spot-a-possible-insi...
yea, as others have pointed out, non-fiction is not appropriate label for this book.
There are a bunch of accounting firms, law firms, and consulting agencies that don't allow their employees to wear super expensive clothing, jewelry or drive luxury cars in front of their clients. And they aren't even doing anything illegal.
It sounds plausible, but is not true like everything else by Abagnale.
Dixon (stop it!) is a direct proof:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/05/12/dixon-illi...
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/05/11/inside-the-biggest-mu...
20 year span, $50 million stolen in most brazen way possible. Buying expensive horses and giving Hermes bags as gifts on small town comptroller salary, nobody questioned it.
> Top Navy officials acknowledged after Veliotis fled that they had were worried that he might compromise national security, and a major internal investigation was conducted to determine how much information he might have. Its results have not been made public.
I wonder if anyone knows -- why was he able to hide out in Greece? Apparently the US had an extradition treaty in place with Greece since the 1930s. Especially if he was a security liability, you'd think the US would have greater than normal motivation to pursue extradition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradit...
Bingo.
Winning by becoming invisible.
> The Requested State shall not be required to extradite its own nationals. Nationality shall be determined as at the time of the offence for which extradition is requested.
I dont claim to know the details of his case, but setup above is generally not uncommon, swiss even have special residency permit for folks bringing millions+ into the country, no need for pesky jobs like us peasants.
a) started later and aimed at "terrorists" (and it seems hard to argue that this guy is in that category)
b) used to take people to black sites in 3rd countries, not to face charges or detention in the US
... and because of its dubious status under international law, it seems like it would be not a good look as a response to corruption issues?
Hold up, even the US doesn't do the death penalty for fraud and perjury right?
Or if you want to get more conspiratorial, he could have been hanging onto these as a negotiating tool:
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP91-00561R0001000...
Yeah, the surname is not Veliotis in search query, but the system finds it as 'Panagiotis Takis Veliotis'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_tFSWZXKN0
Also bear in mind that Putin has a record of killing or imprisoning people he regards as being insufficiently loyal.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/comrade-...
The original allegation was made by Sergei Kolesnikov, not Navalny. Reuters traced the money which was used to build Putin's Palace. Any of Putin's associates can claim ownership in order to take the heat off of him, but it is his to use as he sees fit.
https://apnews.com/article/hunter-biden-fbi-informant-smirno...
We can see this even in relatively well functioning states: Say, when you make infill development expensive, but provide tax abatements to compensate, but said abatements must be approved by a board of aldermen or something like that. Being able to control who builds more cheaply is valuable, an then you just make sure that you only vote yes to good friends that patronize your cousin's consulting business.
The less discretion the bureaucrat has, the harder it is for them to be corrupt. And in the soviet union, they had a lof of discretion.
This is what pisses me off about the SF planning commission. They shouldn't get to make case-by-case decisions about what building projects go through. This should be handled by career employees that consult a checklist of items that need to be completed, and codes that need to be followed, and when all those boxes are checked, that's what approval looks like.
It's not even relevant whether the planning commission is corrupt or not. The fact that they get to make arbitrary value judgments is a problem.
For people who think the USSR was "more corrupt" they're often talking about a narrow conception of corruption that is defined by the US on technical terms. Or they're simply talking about the behavioral differences between rich vs poor countries.
Boeing's quality issues are a great example because it's very obviously corruption, but not in the US technical sense. But the reality is that Boeing and the US government basically said yeah fuck it, do your own QA for the 737 Max and then after the fuckups turned around and said okay we won't charge you the full fine. And that would have just gone away if the 787 fuckups didn't happen. Now suddnely people look really bad giving Boeing sweetheart enforcement deals.
Americans think corruption is a cop pocketing $ on the side of the highway, but it's not corruption when the cop confiscates $ on the side of the highway without trial, gives it to his police department, which pays out the confiscated funds as bonuses, new equipment, and other various frivolities.
At least the Soviets spit in your face when and how they wanted to and were limited by physicality. Americans make a Rube Golberg machine where saliva of their oligarchs is collected throughout the day in massive quantities and piped out of the building where it happens to land on your face 80% of the time. Then they will tell you it's your fault for being in the way of the spit pipes.
We cannot recognize corruption in the US because our corruption is mechanical, and we've precluded that mechanical things cannot be a form of corruption.
USSR corruption was more visceral and obvious, that's pretty much it. This makes a lot more sense if you understand that all measures of "corruption" don't define corruption but use the perception of corruption.
Another example. Ukraine is a corrupt country, no doubt about it. But the "anti-corruption" NGO complex in Ukraine essentially prevents certain laws from passing like sourcing laws which exist in all major developed countries. They see these laws as a form of corruption, which in and of themselves they're not. The other reality is that a lot of the anti-corruption NGO's are corrupt. The reason they argue against sourcing laws is because foreign entities stand to lose money if Ukraine has to buy a certain percentage of goods from Ukrainian factories. Foreign money buys NGO's easily there, so NGO's don't' want their funding to dry up. So everything is in stasis.
But by Western standards none of the above is "corruption" because while the people making these deals can likely speak freely, by Western standards it's really easy to hide this corruption as coincidental and unrelated business decisions.
In reality corruption itself is an industry because it's a way to make money and a tool to make money with. Corruption is not a really simple thing to adjudicate
There is a persistent myth that Communist Russia was an egalitarian paradise. I believe that his is primarily due to propagandistic efforts to pull third world countries into their sphere of influence through token displays of friendship.
During the Cold War, ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union were treated just as bad as US minorities.
Today the situation is even worse. The Ukraine war is being used as, among other things, an excuse to ethnically cleanse the Russian Federation of ethnic minorities.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/02/24/2-years-into-ukrai...
This part is simply not true.
> Today the situation is even worse.
This part is.
The USSR was never institutionally racist. Russian chauvanism was still a thing in the USSR and that was relic of the Tsarist era that keeps on giving.
The USSR's repressions were not a cut and dry wealth transfer between ethnicities unlike the US policies.
At their worst in terms of American morality, institutionally targeted programs were to enforce political control and break nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups.
The vast majority of the repressions in the USSR were a result of the explosive growth of productive forces. It's very hard to make the case for the USSR that the benefits of those productive forces inherently benefitted Russians over everyone else.
It's very easy to make the case in the US for white supremacy.
I think you are misusing “institutionally” and mean something more like “openly” or “explicitly”, because everything you cite in support of this describes rather than refutes institutional racism.
Please expand on this.
The justifications upthread are a mix of explaining deliberate bias as not based on animus and explaining biased effects as not being deliberate bias; neither refutes institutional racism.
> institutionally targeted programs were to enforce political control and break nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups.
If that's not "institutional racism", I don't know what is.
This literally means stop nationalist secession movements. Literally no country on earth basically lets their citizens secede dude. Russians were ALSO the target of such programs.
It's like saying state atheism is uniquely Islamophobic or uniquely anti christian or uniquely antisemitic.
I'm not saying it's not repression. It totally is, but it's not racist.
1. The USSR always discriminated non Russian speakers. 2. Collectivisation and military occupation was used as a large scale wealth transfer. In addition forced reeducation camps and population swaps were used to put Russian observers into positions where they were first amongst equals
Russian imperialism has always been the core of the Soviet union.
When people rised up against Russian occupation they got slaughtered in Hungary in 1956 and later in 1968 with the Prague Spring Russian oppression continued
Even that is a blatant understatement. AFAIK, the US didn't do any explicit genocide.
If you don't know your own country's history why are you speculating on the history of the USSR?
No, they weren't, “genocide" has a meaning, and neither of those fit it; it doesn't just mean “bad”. (OTOH, you ar every much correct that the Native American genocide continued in the period in question.)
Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing. Genocide as a criminal charge is mostly a political matter.
California literally admitted that they targeted citizens of Mexican descent for the explicit purpose of illegally cajoling them into emigration and enforced deportation. You learn about it euphemistically as "repatriation" (if at all because almost no HS curriculum teaches this) because oopsie.
If the USSR rounded up all the Japanese and put them in a camp, you wouldn't hear the end of it in the West. Roosevelt himself used the term concentration camps. You learn about it euphemistically as "internment" because "they had a good reason to do it, and sometimes you know we get things wrong!!". An argument that can really only be used if you prelabel good guys and bad guys.
The main difference between US camps and USSR camps is that the US camps were nicer and had food.
The quality of repression scales with the wealth to some degree. The USSR couldn't support the same quality of life for their prisoners that the US could.
Today the US refuses to provide the same quality of life for their prisoners that less wealthy OECD countries do provide.
“Internment camps” and “concentration camps” are historical synonyms, the latter has subsequently taken on additional negative loading because of euphemistic use of the term for German extermination camps.
> The main difference between US camps and USSR camps is that the US camps were nicer and had food.
That's... A fairly substantive difference. Detaining people without just cause is bad. Doing so without food is murder.
WW2 era ethnic (primarily, but not exclusively, Japanese) internment in the US was definitely a violation of moral human rights, as were numerous post-WW2 efforts targeting people in the US of Hispanic/Latino ancestry, often on the pretext of illegal immigration. Neither was genocidal; not all bad things are genocide.
This is completely wrong.
The term concentration camp was invented in the Second Boer War. It described a tactic of war used by the English against to Boers and native Africans. Because Boers and Africans did not have centralized cities and lived off the land rather than having industrialized farming the developed tactics of disrupting the supply lines didn't work on them. The supply lines were too horizontal.
So first they burned and salted the land so that Boers and Africans could no longer subsist. Then they forced the people whose lives they destroyed into what they called concentration camps.
~50k people died in these concentration camps essentially every 3rd person that went in.
The forcible population transfer at gunpoint is what differentiates concentration camps from internment camps which were used by the Spanish in Cuba in the Ten Years War.
Unlike the English who simply treated humans like cattle and forced them to move the Spanish evicted Cubans and killed those who did not comply after 10 days. The US took the English route for the Japanese, while using the Spanish name to differentiate themselves from Nazis who also ran concentration camps.
Likewise it's really funny to say that GULAGs were genocidal while US internment wasn't, because literally there's less intent (in the Western legalistic sense) of genocide in the GULAG case. GULAGs were equal opportunity in terms of ethnicity. Japanese internment wasn't. GULAGs were a problem because the USSR got addicted to slave labor relations that it recreated from a previous era, the USA of all countries has no real standing to criticize it on those grounds because the US still does this to this day, which is why the old Sovietologists were grasping at straws to ideologically differentiate between two similar systems. The big 4 western theories of the function of GULAGs (Solzhetsyn, Consquest, Applebaum and Bauer) literally do not include ethnic cleansing. That's a neologism.
There's no point in continuing the discussion since you literally do not even know the history of what you're talking about.
Edit: To make it crystal clear.
The difference between the GULAG system and the Soviet population transfers and the US internment and deportations that gives more creedence to US commiting ethnic cleansing is the ethnic composition of the material benefactors of those actions and their victims.
The people who were victims in the US were targetted minorities who were disposessed of their wealth by their fellow white citizens.
The people who were victims in the USSR were not targeted minorities, and the benefactors were not an ethnic majority whose main benefit was taking their victim's property.
Regardless, though, I feel like you aren't really arguing the salient question anymore: did Japanese internment during WWII constitute genocide? As I understand the term -- mass murder and extinction of an ethnic or cultural group -- no, Japanese internment was absolutely not genocide. Jewish (and other) internment in Europe during WWII absolutely was, though, given the intent (and unfortunate amount of success) at killing large numbers of the people imprisoned.
Words have meanings, and those meanings matter. Otherwise we're just flinging around emotional charge without talking about anything real.
> Likewise it's really funny to say that GULAGs were genocidal while US internment wasn't
I believe you're the first person to bring up gulags, so that's a bit of a straw man.
The person you replied to upthread acknowledged (a bit late for my taste, but acknowledged) that what the US did to native peoples in the 1800s was genocide, so I'm not sure why you're still arguing that point. I don't think you can make a case that the Mexican Repatriation was genocide, as this was about forced migration, not murder and extermination. (The atrocities around Native Americans were also partially about forced migration -- which was more of an excuse than a goal -- but the end result was indeed genocide.)
Again, all of these things are bad! But (as another poster said), just because something is bad and is targeted at a particular ethnic group, that doesn't mean it's genocide.
You're making distinctions in service of, "Well, we weren't THAT bad," but generally, I would think the nominal international champion of freedom and justice would want to stay away from even the whiff of such things.
What does my country history have to do with anything on this discussion? It's all about the US and the USSR.
And that hasn't changed to this day. There are lots of migrants from former Soviet republics in central Asia that come to Russia for work and life, and they experience bigotry and discrimination.
The recent theater shooting & fire in Moscow has inflamed tensions, as many people blame Tajiks for the violence, and take it out on any random Tajik in the city. Similar to the anti-Arab racism and violence in the US post-9/11.
In 2021 a Tajik woman represented Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest, and many Russians were angry about this "not a real Russian" representing them. Some of the online discourse about it (according to my Russian-speaking friends) was truly disgusting.
Russia is no better than the US (and many other ethnically-diverse countries) on this metric.
The Cold War wasn’t about a clash of ideologies. And if it was then Russia becoming a corrupt capitalist nation rather than a corrupt communist one would be a win for the other side.
[0]https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cbo-american-wealt...
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
[2]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Guess how we can tell you've never actually lived in a corrupt oligarchy, and only read about it on the internet.
While I'm not comfortable with the wealth concentration in the US, at least people aren't getting rounded up and "disappeared" when they talk about it.
As to the grand parent: that’s just whining about relative privation.
All that reveals is that "talking about it" doesn't threaten the system, which isn't something to be proud of. Instead of destroying dissent, it is hushed, polarized, deflected, diluted. I guess polite totalitarianism is better than impolite totalitarianism? It's certainly more durable.
That is what happened.
Soviet union just collapsed faster than US. US was in orders of magnitude better shape after WWII. This gave it >5 decades longer slippery slope than USSR had. But it will collapse in a decade, especially if it attempts to go head to head when China takes back Taiwan in 3-5 years.
The reality is that rapid industrialization regardless of your ideology is an extreme productive process which magnifies the effects of production which are not in and of themselves free of negative outputs. In USA capitalism like in USSR communism the negative outputs of production are simply ignored and the people who they affect have no choice in what negative effects they must bear and what is being produced.
A Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan could end catastrophically for China.
What are you even talking about?
That’s probably true. I never understood the assertion that the US or Reagan “won” the Cold War. The US just persisted longer.
It's not a “this or that” thing. You win by being the last standing.
I mean, that's literally what happened. The USSR collapsed. I'm sure the US had some part in that, but I don't think it was a major part. The US "winning" the Cold War was just spin.
But still, being the last one standing is indeed a certain kind of winning.
Articles as late as 1987 just list him as "a fugitive hiding in Athens", then nothing.
Did he get away with it?
[1] There was mention in one article from the 80s that he may have been granted a limited immunity as part of providing evidence, which may have helped him avoid a more aggressive effort to have him returned.
I would like to know what happened on Aug 9?