What Happened Today: December 13, 2022
SBF arrested; migrant wave crashes into Texas; David Samuels: The Rower
The Big Story
Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO of FTX, the bankrupt crypto exchange, was arrested on Monday in the Bahamas on charges filed by the U.S. Department of Justice in the Southern District Court of New York. Taken into custody on Monday night by Bahamian police acting on an extradition treaty with the United States, Bankman-Fried will eventually be moved to the United States to stand charges from both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission accusing him of “defraud[ing] FTX customers by misappropriating their funds for his personal use, including to invest for his own account, to make tens of millions of dollars of political contributions, and to cover billions of dollars in expenses and debts of Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency hedge fund also founded by the defendant.”
At a hearing Tuesday before the House Committee on Financial Services related to the collapse of FTX—where Bankman-Fried had been scheduled to appear before his arrest—John Ray, who assumed control of the company during its bankruptcy proceedings, said the poor records and the gross mismanagement of the exchange have made it difficult to fully assess the scope of possible wrongdoing by Bankman-Fried and his associates. “Even with most failed companies, we have a fair roadmap of what happened. We’re dealing with a literal paperless bankruptcy,” he said, though he added that the foundation of the case was still “old-fashioned embezzlement.”
In explaining the case being made against Bankman-Fried, prosecutors highlighted the ways in which he skirted campaign finance rules “by causing political contributions to candidates and committees associated with both major political parties to be made in the names of co-conspirators, when in fact those contributions were funded by Alameda Research with misappropriated customer funds.” The attempt to circumnavigate political donation laws involved failing to report donations and misrepresenting the amount of money given to political candidates—a scheme, the prosecutors wrote, “in service of the defendant’s desire to influence the direction of policy and legislation on the cryptocurrency industry.”
Read More: https://www.reuters.com/legal/bankman-fried-appear-bahamas-court-us-unveil-charges-2022-12-13/
In the Back Pages: The Rower
The Rest
→ A caravan of upwards of a thousand migrants hailing primarily from Nicaragua crossed over the West Texas border on Sunday night, the largest single wave to arrive en masse in recent years. Unless a court intervenes to allow the public health measure known as Title 42 to stay in place, granting border agents wide latitude to expel newly arriving migrants attempting to cross the border illegally, officials anticipate similar surges across the length of the southern border when the policy expires later this month. In October, El Paso alone saw some 50,000 people illegally stream into the city from Central and South America. “The numbers are like nothing I’ve seen for the last 25 years,” said Blake Barrow, the director of El Paso’s Rescue Mission, a shelter that’s now “bursting at the seams.” Barrow’s shelter largely catered to homeless American citizens over the summer, but now roughly 30% of the people it helps are U.S. citizens, as staff struggles to find beds for the influx of migrants. “Honestly, I don’t know how to address this problem,” Barrow told The New York Times. “The situation is overwhelming us.”
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/us/el-paso-migrants-border.html
→ Former Loudoun County Superintendent Scott Ziegler and Public Information Office Wayde Byard in Virginia were indicted by a grand jury last week on several charges stemming from their failures to handle two sexual assaults involving a student.
This January, a teenager within the county’s school system was convicted in juvenile court for sexually assaulting a female classmate at Stone Bridge High School in May 2021, after which he was transferred to Broad Run High School, where he then abducted and sexually assaulted another female student in October.
A grand jury report released last week alleges that Ziegler lied to his school board and misled the public at a meeting in June 2021, after the first assault took place.
At the June board meeting convened to discuss non-gender-specific bathrooms in the schools, Ziegler said, “To my knowledge we don’t have any record of [sexual] assaults in our restrooms.” However, emails presented to the grand jury reveal that Ziegler had sent an email about the sexual assault incident earlier that year. According to the Associated Press, “Teachers at both schools [also] warned administrators of the student’s disturbing conduct weeks before each assault occurred.”
“My child was raped at school!” the father of one of the victim’s said at the June 2021 meeting, before he was detained by police.
“What happened to her on Oct. 6, 2021, could have and should have been prevented,” the family of the second victim said in a statement after the release of the grand jury report. “Multiple red flags during the time period of May 12, 2021, to Oct. 6, 2021, were raised and ignored.”
→ Video Map of the Day:
The United States has so far sent $68 billion to Ukraine to support its war effort against Russia, and last month Congress was eyeing up another $38 billion aid package. Spending budgets in the billions can become so abstract they’re hard to visualize, but this new map helps clarify somewhat the scale of money involved, with each individual dot showing the $100,000 behind the military, humanitarian, and government aid sent from the United States.
→ Leonard Cohen’s two adult children say they have proof that attorney Robert Kory forged documents related to the singer’s estate before Cohen’s 2016 death, excising his children from the management of the $48 million Leonard Cohen Archive that Kory and his son have monetized in recent years. After finding that his long-time manager was embezzling his fortune, Cohen returned to the road in his seventies, touring extensively to rebuild his nest egg. That income, along with the royalties from his music, photographs, and writing, became the family estate that pays out $400,000 annual salaries to the two Cohen children. Kory, for his part, denies any wrongdoing and has submitted to the court documents that suggest Cohen appointed Kory to handle the estate out of concern the children couldn’t manage it properly. “[Cohen] was concerned that his children didn’t have a sufficiently comfortable relationship to work together upon the complexities of the artist’s estate,” writes Reeve Chudd, one of the singer’s attorneys.
→ Number of the Day: 50%
That’s how much U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hopes he’ll be able to increase the number of raids on workplaces employing undocumented migrants, he told the House of Commons last week. The uptick in workplace crackdowns comes as part of Sunak’s radical overhaul of the United Kingdom’s strategy to contain a spiraling migrant crisis. Currently, border agents are struggling with waves of migrants arriving by boat, which has only added to the backlog of 150,000 asylum claims waiting to be processed. The overhaul of the migrant system will add hundreds of agents deployed to handle claims, establish an annual quota for asylum seekers allowed into the United Kingdom, and tighten the definition of what qualifies as “objective evidence” to qualify for asylum. Nearly 25% of all asylum claims this year have come from Albania, with 85% of the people behind those claims arriving by small boats from Albania.
→ On the one hand, U.S. officials want to stay in the good graces of the three island nations of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau as China seeks to court more influence in the Pacific region. On the other hand, the economic assistance the United States provides to the nations costs a fortune, especially for the postal service, which says it has lost more than $110 million over the past 20 years providing the nations their mail service. That’s only added to the ongoing financial woes at the USPS, and its reluctance to sign on to a new set of 20-year deals known as the Compacts of Free Association has hampered ongoing negotiations with the island leaders. “They really did great damage to the process and ultimately to the strategic relationships that we have” with the three nations, one formal official told The Wall Street Journal. “It was a huge problem.” Top officials have been able to smooth out most of the postal-service-related bumps, however, and new deals worth billions of dollars in economic assistance appear imminent. In exchange, the islands provide missile testing facilities to the United States, as well as exclusive military use of the region.
→ “You are simply the standard by which basketball excellence is measured,” David Stern, the former commissioner of the NBA, told Michael Jordan as he passed to him his third NBA Most Valuable Player Trophy in 1992. Jordan would indeed establish a new standard for the game, going on to win a total of five MVP trophies. Now the MVP trophy will bear his name. Rebranded the Michael Jordan Trophy, the league’s MVP hardware won’t bear Jordan’s likeness, but the figure depicted, a player breaking out of a rock foundation reaching for a crystal basketball, will stand 23.6 inches, weigh 23.6 pounds, and include a base shaped to a 15-degree angle, nods to his famous jersey number No. 23 and the six titles he won during during his 15 years in the league. Jordan was intimately involved in the design process, working alongside a longtime collaborator at Nike’s Jordan Brand, Mark Smith. “This is actually the highest achievement for a single player ... and it’s mind-blowing,” Smith said. “It’ll be a mind-blower.”
→ Tweet of the Day:
In its critical coverage of the release of the so-called Twitter Files, The Washington Post incorrectly identified Twitter File authors Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, who’d received internal Twitter documents from Elon Musk, as “conservative journalists,” a label that was both entirely inaccurate and a cheap ploy meant to undermine their credibility. The no-so-subtle dig at Taibbi and Weiss--center-left reporters raising heterodox points seen as threatening to a status quo that had been enforced by the former management of the social media platform--caused a minor uproar online, which led The Washington Post to simply stealth-edit the descriptor out of the piece, altering the tenor and intent of the article without including an editor’s note, a journalistically dubious move that suggests even a newspaper’s integrity can die in darkness.
TODAY IN TABLET:
On Jewish Vulgarity by David Mikics
With John Murray Cuddihy’s ‘The Ordeal of Civility’ and Yuri Slezkine’s ‘The Jewish Century,’ Tablet begins a three-part look at the once-vibrant Jewish trait of not caring what the goyim think
Valya by Yelena Akhtiorskaya
A love story
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
In honor of “The Rower,” David Samuels’ epic story about the Danish Olympic rower Knud Christiansen—an excerpt of which is running in today’s Back Pages exclusively for Scroll subscribers, with the full story appearing on Tablet tomorrow—we’re presenting a special Metallica playlist. Why Metallica? You’ll have to read it to find out. Get the full story in tomorrow’s Tablet.
The Rower
A story about karma
Knud Christiansen was not a big thinker or a person in the news. Still, I feel confident in saying that he was one of the greatest men or women I have been lucky enough to meet—and arguably, in terms of his personal impact on the lives of others, one of the greatest men of the 20th century, which awarded its highest accolades of fame and power to people who caused unaccountable destruction and suffering. Our sole encounter, which took place in either 1983 or 1984 in a clock repair store located on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 61st Street in Manhattan, may have lasted as long as 15 minutes, though it was probably shorter. I remember it was raining outside, which is why I took shelter in his shop.
To combat the tedium of my high school years, in the 1980s I had adopted the habit of time travel, whether via paintings in museums or novels and history books, which transported me to places far beyond the boringly familiar if not yet entirely manicured confines of the Upper East Side. The man behind the counter, with a long white beard, in a dark woolen watch cap, reminded me of an old sea dog in a Patrick O’Brian novel. He was smoking a pipe, and the smell of his tobacco in the closed space with the sound of the rain beating down against the plate glass window remains as vivid to me as the image of the man himself. The smoke from his pipe seemed to symbolize the passing of time, curling up toward the ceiling in front of a wall of broken clocks of all shapes and sizes, most with tags hanging down from one part or another to indicate the name of the owner and the nature of the repair that was needed. Given the significance of clockmaker iconography in 17th- and 18th-century European painting and thought with which I was familiar (my high school girlfriend worked at the Met), it is not surprising that this image remained fixed in my head as a kind of homespun illustration of the idea of God.
Knud Christiansen couldn’t actually make clocks. He could only fix them, and, as it turned out, even that talent was intermingled with a good-natured proclivity for the con. Yet the karmic wheel that his life set in motion, which my visit to his shop allowed me to glimpse through a keyhole only briefly, and which would become clear to me many years later, suggests that my youthful perception was perhaps not entirely wrong.
The hinge upon which my understanding of Knud Christiansen’s life turned was a device of the type that Alfred Hitchcock referred to as a “MacGuffin,” i.e. the random object or event that sets a larger plot in motion. The MacGuffin here was a winning $300 million Powerball lottery ticket that was cashed in 2002 in a remote county of West Virginia by a man named Jack Whittaker, known to his friends and family as Big Daddy. Despite being the largest single jackpot winner in American history up until that time, Big Daddy had refused to be interviewed. I convinced him otherwise by driving up and down the local highways until I spotted what I correctly surmised was the only gold-plated Hummer in the county, which was registered to Jack Whittaker. Spotting Big Daddy behind the wheel, I pursued him at varying speeds until he pulled into a convenience store parking lot, and, after entering the store and talking for a while with the cashier, agreed to give me an interview. My account of the serial tragedies that had blighted his life since he cashed his winning Powerball ticket led to a phone call from a man from New Jersey who complimented my article, and offered that he was working on a screenplay about Big Daddy’s life and downfall for which my input might be useful. Flattered, I agreed to meet him for coffee near an office I kept in the Flower District.
As it turned out, the screenwriter was in his eighties, and had not had a screenplay produced in 40 years. Nor had he ever met Big Daddy in person, even though he talked to him on the phone at least once a week. At the end of our meeting, he gave me a screenplay to read—a B-movie Holocaust revenge fantasy he had authored years earlier, about an inmate of a Nazi concentration camp brothel who seeks revenge on her tormentors after the war.
Oddly, despite its comic-book framing and hopelessly exploitative B-movie subject matter, or perhaps because of those things, I thought the screenplay was funny, and also strangely moving. So I sent it to my agent in Los Angeles in the hope that she would hate it, and I would thereby get the screenwriter, or would-be screenwriter—who in addition to being over 80 years old had a pronounced hunchback, which by itself seemed likely to ensure that any future pitch meetings would end in calamity—out of my hair.
The script went nowhere, but the screenwriter was grateful for my help. He wanted to thank me, he said, by bequeathing a story he had hoped to write himself for many years, but which he doubted he would ever have time to finish, or even properly begin. It was a true story, my guest continued, about a member of the 1936 Danish Olympic rowing team who began rowing Jews to Sweden—a personal act of incredible bravery and daring that led directly to the seaborne rescue of nearly the entire Danish Jewish community from the Nazis. If nothing else, he slyly suggested, it would make a great movie. Maybe Steven Spielberg would direct it.
Touched by his optimism, yet eager to flee (the normal response of any writer when presented with such gifts being a sincere “thank you” followed by a speedy exit), I suggested, gently, that there was no shortage of Hollywood movies about the Holocaust, beginning with Spielberg’s own Schindler’s List. The hunchback seemed disappointed, but only for a moment. The rower, he continued, had also helped bring Tibetan Buddhism to America, and smoked salmon to Zabar’s. Maybe those adventures could also be subjects for a movie. By my calculations, I had maybe another three minutes to get this man out of my life, before the glint in his eye triggered something in me that might lead us both down the road to God knows where.
“So,” I asked him, while beckoning for the check, “is this rower still alive?”
“Maybe,” he answered. “I’m not sure.”
“He’s in Denmark?” I countered. Surely, the Atlantic Ocean would be wide enough to protect me from any further engagement.
“Oh, he hasn’t been to Denmark for many years,” the hunchback answered airily. “He used to go swimming at the JCC on the Upper West Side, about 20 blocks from here. But he’s not been well.”
“That’s too bad,” I answered, with relief.
The hunchback looked downcast. Then he perked up. “I think I might have his daughter’s email address somewhere,” he suggested.
“Great, send it to me when you find it,” I replied, as I started to get up from the table.
Then, with only a hair’s breadth separating me from a clean escape, I felt an invisible hand tugging on my coat. “What else did he do in New York besides selling lox to Zabar’s?” I asked.
“Oh, lots of things,” the hunchback answered. “For one, he had a shop on Lexington Avenue for many years, where he fixed clocks.”