http://thekomisarscoop.com Reports & Analysis by Investigative Journalist Lucy Komisar Sun, 29 Jun 2008 22:34:59 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.1.2 en http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/06/18/wheres-mobutu/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/06/18/wheres-mobutu/#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:13:08 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/06/18/wheres-mobutu/ I was standing there when Maurice Tempelsman approached Richardson. The Governor greeted him and said, “Where’s Mobutu!” Well, that was a conversation stopper! Tempelsman, a very very rich man, and a generous donor, frequently gets a place of honor at the Council head table, though not today. Nobody raises the question of how he got his money.]]> http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/06/18/wheres-mobutu/feed/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/05/14/the-year-the-war-came-home/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/05/14/the-year-the-war-came-home/#comments Wed, 14 May 2008 14:20:50 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/05/14/the-year-the-war-came-home/ "The Conscientious Objector" by Michael Murphy describes the personal and political conflict faced by civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. over his decision to speak out publicly against the war. "Something You Did" by Willy Holtzman examines the decision of a stand-in for Kathy Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground, to "bring the war home" by participating in a violent action that left a bystander dead.]]> http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/05/14/the-year-the-war-came-home/feed/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/05/01/the-houswifes-lament/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/05/01/the-houswifes-lament/#comments Thu, 01 May 2008 13:58:08 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/05/01/the-houswifes-lament/ Since the 1950s, views in the United States have changed a lot about whether marriage is good for women -- or at least about the nature of its serious disadvantages. Four Broadway plays spanning those decades show one prominent downside: marriage as a smoldering cauldron of unfulfilled sexual desire or betrayal. The U.S. works are about small-town Middle America: the Midwest, Mississippi, Oklahoma. They are William Inge's "Come Back, Little Sheba", Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", and Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County". The British revival is Harold Pinter's "The Homecoming", about working class London.]]> http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/05/01/the-houswifes-lament/feed/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/04/09/something-wicked-this-way-comes/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/04/09/something-wicked-this-way-comes/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:56:09 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/04/09/something-wicked-this-way-comes/ Anyone who has watched television would be fascinated by the story of its creation by Philo Farnsworth, a genius inventor who grew up in Idaho in the 1920s -- and of its theft by David Sarnoff, the President of NBC.]]> http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/04/09/something-wicked-this-way-comes/feed/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/26/larry-summers-on-rubin-and-money-laundering/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/26/larry-summers-on-rubin-and-money-laundering/#comments Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:31:18 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/26/larry-summers-on-rubin-and-money-laundering/ I pointed out that Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (who happens to be one of the Council’s co-chairs) had not acted against money-laundering because he didn’t want to stop the free flow of cash into the US – in effect, into Wall Street. But when Summers succeeded Rubin in the job, he had taken action. The facts are important because Rubin is poised to move into a Democratic administration -- especially if Clinton wins -- as a high-level Wall Street influential.]]> http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/26/larry-summers-on-rubin-and-money-laundering/feed/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/10/the-big-crime-in-the-spitzer-scandal-is-money-laundering/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/10/the-big-crime-in-the-spitzer-scandal-is-money-laundering/#comments Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:19:48 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/10/the-big-crime-in-the-spitzer-scandal-is-money-laundering/ laundering. New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's downfall began with an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service. That’s because when people move money for illicit purposes, they try to disguise the flows. And US banks are required to report suspicious transfers to the Treasury Department. The IRS gets involved, because those transfers could be effected to hide income from taxes. So it responded to bank reports of suspicious transfers by Spitzer, who was paying thousands of dollars for call girl services. The money was being sent to QAT consulting, a shell company owned by the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. prostitution ring. Then the FBI joined the United States Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigative Division, looking into what appeared to be at first possible government corruption but then turned out to be payments to an organization running prostitution. And also laundering money in the United States and Europe. ]]> http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/10/the-big-crime-in-the-spitzer-scandal-is-money-laundering/feed/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/04/tom-stoppards-rock-n-roll-dissects-political-morality/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/04/tom-stoppards-rock-n-roll-dissects-political-morality/#comments Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:44:32 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/04/tom-stoppard%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9crock-%e2%80%98n%e2%80%99-roll%e2%80%9d-dissects-political-morality/ of a sculptor’s rock quarry that had been lent to a dissident jazz club. It all came back to me when I saw Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ‘N’ Roll,” on Broadway, directed by Trevor Nunn, about Czech dissidents and the government officials who repressed them. Jan (Rufus Sewell) protests a crackdown against rock musicians, is jailed and then spends a dozen years working in a bakery.]]> http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/04/tom-stoppards-rock-n-roll-dissects-political-morality/feed/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/03/ex-rock-impressario-tony-defries-lost-22-million-in-offshore-tax-evasion-scheme/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/03/ex-rock-impressario-tony-defries-lost-22-million-in-offshore-tax-evasion-scheme/#comments Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:51:30 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/03/ex-rock-impressario-tony-defries-implicated-in-offshore-tax-evasion-scheme/ David Bowie and who takes credit for managing, marketing and branding such rock stars as Lou Reed and John Mellencamp as well as being “present at the birth of Madonna [and] the reincarnation of Stevie Wonder,” might be making some headlines of his own soon. (He is shown here in 1972 with Bowie's wife Angie on his right.) The ex-impresario, a Brit who now lives in Los Angeles and who for a promoter is unaccountably interview- and camera-shy, was one of the beneficiaries of a fake annuity scheme organized by a Swiss bank and its partner, a pseudo insurance company whose main product seems to be tax evasion. But the "benefit" turned out to be a disaster.]]> http://thekomisarscoop.com/2008/03/03/ex-rock-impressario-tony-defries-lost-22-million-in-offshore-tax-evasion-scheme/feed/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2007/12/28/bhutto-in-1987-talked-to-me-of-concern-about-afghan-militants-and-how-she-dealt-with-death-threats/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2007/12/28/bhutto-in-1987-talked-to-me-of-concern-about-afghan-militants-and-how-she-dealt-with-death-threats/#comments Sat, 29 Dec 2007 00:28:30 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2007/12/28/bhutto-in-1987-talked-to-me-of-concern-about-afghan-militants-and-how-she-dealt-with-life-threats/ We talked for an hour in an interview I videotaped. It was the day after I traveled with her on a political procession in Sailkot, in the Punjab, northern Pakistan, where she was mobbed by supporters. She was prescient about the impact of the Islamic Afghanis who had arrived in Pakistan during the war with the Soviet-supported government. She said "a long-term domestic fallout" would be that "even if Afghanistan today is solved and guaranteed by both superpowers, what about the future? Because the network has been created."]]> http://thekomisarscoop.com/2007/12/28/bhutto-in-1987-talked-to-me-of-concern-about-afghan-militants-and-how-she-dealt-with-death-threats/feed/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2007/12/14/play-shows-wests-moral-failures-in-rwanda/ http://thekomisarscoop.com/2007/12/14/play-shows-wests-moral-failures-in-rwanda/#comments Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:44:01 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2007/12/14/play-shows-wests-moral-failures-in-rwanda/ In Rogers' fictional story, a U.S. family visits Rwanda in 1994. Jack, a professor, accompanied by wife Linda and son Geoffrey, is researching a book about grassroots activists and comes to interview his old college roommate, Joseph, a Tutsi who runs a children's AIDS clinic. But Joseph has disappeared.]]> http://thekomisarscoop.com/2007/12/14/play-shows-wests-moral-failures-in-rwanda/feed/