Month: January 2020

REMEMBER: PANAMA PAPERS

Panama Papers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to navigationJump to searchNot to be confused with Paradise Papers.Countries with politicians, public officials or close associates implicated in the leak on April 15, 2016 (as of May 19, 2016)

The Panama Papers (Spanish: Papeles de Panamá) are 11.5 million leaked documents that detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities.[1][2] The documents, some dating back to the 1970s,[3] were created by, and taken from, Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca.[4]

The documents contain personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials that had previously been kept private.[5] While offshore business entities are legal (see Offshore Magic Circle), reporters found that some of the Mossack Fonseca shell corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.[6]

“John Doe“, the whistleblower who leaked the documents to German journalist Bastian Obermayer[7][8] from the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), remains anonymous, even to the journalists who worked on the investigation. “My life is in danger”, he told them.[9] In a May 6, 2016, statement, John Doe cited income inequality as the reason for his action, and said he leaked the documents “simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described”. He added that he had never worked for any government or intelligence agency and expressed willingness to help prosecutors if granted immunity from prosecution. After SZ verified that the statement did in fact come from the source for the Panama Papers, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) posted the full document on its website.[10][11]

SZ asked the ICIJ for help because of the amount of data involved. Journalists from 107 media organizations in 80 countries analyzed documents detailing the operations of the law firm.[3] After more than a year of analysis, the first news stories were published on April 3, 2016, along with 150 of the documents themselves.[12] The project represents an important milestone in the use of data journalism software tools and mobile collaboration.

The documents were dubbed the Panama Papers because of the country they were leaked from, but the Panamanian government expressed strong objections to the name over concerns that it would tarnish the government’s and country’s image worldwide, as did other entities in Panama and elsewhere.[13] Some media outlets covering the story have used the name “Mossack Fonseca papers”.[14]

Contents

Disclosures[edit]

A conversation between Süddeutsche Zeitung reporter Bastian Obermayer and anonymous source John Doe[15]

In addition to the much-covered business dealings of British prime minister David Cameron and Icelandic prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, the leaked documents also contain identity information about the shareholders and directors of 214,000 shell companies set up by Mossack Fonseca, as well as some of their financial transactions. It is generally not against the law (in and of itself) to own an offshore shell company, although offshore shell companies may sometimes be used for illegal purposes.

The journalists on the investigative team found business transactions by many important figures in world politics, sports and art. While many of the transactions were legal, since the data is incomplete, questions remain in many other cases; still others seem to clearly indicate ethical if not legal impropriety. Some disclosures – tax avoidance in very poor countries by very wealthy entities and individuals for example – lead to questions on moral grounds. According to The Namibian for instance, a shell company registered to Beny Steinmetz, Octea, owes more than $700,000 US in property taxes to the city of Koidu in Sierra Leone, and is $150 million in the red, even though its exports were more than twice that in an average month in the 2012–2015 period. Steinmetz himself has personal worth of $6 billion.[16]

Other offshore shell company transactions described in the documents do seem to have broken exchange laws, violated trade sanctions or stemmed from political corruption, according to ICIJ reporters. For example:

  • Uruguay has arrested five people and charged them with money-laundering through Mossack Fonseca shell companies for a Mexican drug cartel.[17]
  • Ouestaf, an ICIJ partner in the investigation, reported that it had discovered new evidence that Karim Wade received payments from DP World (DP). He and a long-time friend were convicted of this in a trial that the United Nations and Amnesty International said was unfair and violated the defendants’ rights. The Ouestaf article does not address the conduct of the trial, but does say that Ouestaf journalists found Mossack Fonseca documents showing payments to Wade via a DP subsidiary and a shell company registered to the friend.[18]
  • Swiss lawyer Dieter Neupert has been accused of mishandling client funds and helping both oligarchs and the Qatari royal family to hide money.[19]

Named in the leak were 12 current or former world leaders; 128 other public officials and politicians; and hundreds of celebrities, businessmen, and other wealthy individuals of over 200 countries.[20]

Tax havens[edit]

See also: United States as a tax haven and Panama as a tax havenFrom a leaked internal memorandumNinety-five per cent of our work coincidentally consists in selling vehicles to avoid taxes.

Mossack Fonseca[3]

Individuals and entities may open offshore accounts for any number of reasons, some of which are legal[21] but ethically questionable. A Canadian lawyer based in Dubai noted, for example, that businesses might wish to avoid falling under Islamic inheritance jurisprudence if an owner dies.[22] Businesses in some countries may wish to hold some of their funds in dollars also, said a Brazilian lawyer.[23] Estate planning is another example of legal tax avoidance.

American film-maker Stanley Kubrick had an estimated personal worth of $20 million when he died in 1999, much of it invested in an 18th-century English manor he bought in 1978. He lived in that manor for the rest of his life, filming scenes from The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut there as well. Three holding companies set up by Mossack Fonseca now own the property, and are in turn held by trusts set up for his children and grandchildren.[24] Since Kubrick was an American living in Britain, without the trust his estate would have had to pay transfer taxes to both governments and possibly have been forced to sell the property to obtain the liquid assets to pay them.[25] Kubrick is buried on the grounds along with one of his daughters, and the rest of his family still lives there.[24][25]Poster issued by the British tax authorities to counter offshore tax evasion

Other uses are more ambiguous. Chinese companies may incorporate offshore in order to raise foreign capital, normally against the law in China.[26] In some of the world’s hereditary dictatorships, the law may be on the side of the elite who use offshore companies to award oil contracts to themselves,[27] or gold concessions to their children,[28] however such dealings are sometimes prosecuted under international law.[29]

While no standard official definition exists, The Economist and the International Monetary Fund describe an offshore financial center, or tax haven, as a jurisdiction whose banking infrastructure primarily provides services to people or businesses who do not live there, requires little or no disclosure of information when doing business, and offers low taxes.[30][31]

“The most obvious use of offshore financial centers is to avoid taxes”, The Economist added.[30] Oxfam blamed tax havens in its 2016 annual report on income inequality for much of the widening gap between rich and poor. “Tax havens are at the core of a global system that allows large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share,” said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, “depriving governments, rich and poor, of the resources they need to provide vital public services and tackle rising inequality.”[32]

International Monetary Fund (IMF) researchers estimated in July 2015 that profit shifting by multinational companies costs developing countries around US$213 billion a year, almost two percent of their national income.[33] Igor Angelini, head of Europol‘s Financial Intelligence Group, said that shell companies “play an important role in large-scale money laundering activities” and that they are often a means to “transfer bribe money”.[34] Tax Justice Network concluded in a 2012 report that “designing commercial tax abuse schemes and turning a blind eye upon suspicious transactions have become an inherent part of the work of bankers and accountants”.[35]

Money-laundering affects the first world as well, since a favored shell company investment is real estate in Europe and North America. London, Miami, New York, Paris, Vancouver and San Francisco have all been affected. The practice of parking assets in luxury real estate has been frequently cited as fueling skyrocketing housing prices in Miami,[36][37][38] where the Miami Association of Realtors said that cash sales accounted for 90% of new home sales in 2015.[39] “There is a huge amount of dirty money flowing into Miami that’s disguised as investment,” according to former congressional investigator Jack Blum.[40] In Miami, 76% of condo owners pay cash, a practice considered a red flag for money-laundering.[40]

Real estate in London, where housing prices increased 50% from 2007 to 2016, also is frequently purchased by overseas investors.[41][42][43] Donald Toon, head of Britain’s National Crime Agency, said in 2015 that “the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK”.[43] Three quarters of Londoners under 35 cannot afford to buy a home.[43]

Andy Yan, an urban planning researcher and adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, studied real estate sales in Vancouver—also thought to be affected by foreign purchasers—found that 18% of the transactions in Vancouver’s most expensive neighborhoods were cash purchases, and 66% of the owners appeared to be Chinese nationals or recent arrivals from China.[44] Calls for more data on foreign investors have been rejected by the provincial government.[45] Chinese nationals accounted for 70% of 2014 Vancouver home sales for more than CA$3 million.[46] On June 24, 2016 China CITIC Bank Corp filed suit in Canada against a Chinese citizen who borrowed CN¥50 million for his lumber business in China, but then withdrew roughly CA$7.5 million from the line of credit and left the country. He bought three houses in Vancouver and Surrey, British Columbia together valued at CA$7.3 million during a three-month period in June 2014.[47]

International banking[edit]

See also: Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and Common Reporting Standard

“This issue will surely be raised at the G20 summit,” predicted Tomasz Kozlowski, Ambassador of the European Union (EU) to India. “We need to strengthen international cooperation for exchange of tax information between tax authorities”.[48]

Panama, Vanuatu and Lebanon may find themselves on a list of uncooperative tax havens that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) re-activated in July 2016 at the request of G20 nations, warned Le Monde, a French newspaper that participated in the investigation. Those three countries followed none of the OECD’s three broad guidelines for international banking cooperation:[49]

  • information exchange on request
  • a signed multilateral agreement on information standards
  • a commitment to implement automated information exchange in 2017 or 2018[49]

The OECD, the G20, or the European Union could also institute another list for countries that are inadequate in more than one area. Countries meeting none of these criteria, such as Panama, Vanuatu and Lebanon, would go on the blacklist. Countries that meet only one criterion would go on the greylist.[49] In April 2016, if this greylist had been in place it would have included nine countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Brunei, Dominica, Liberia, Nauru, Samoa, Tobago and the United Arab Emirates.[49]

Newsroom logistics[edit]

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists helped organize the research and document review once Süddeutsche Zeitung realized the scale of the work required to validate the authenticity of 2.6 terabytes[50] of leaked data. They enlisted reporters and resources from The Guardian, the BBC, Le Monde, SonntagsZeitung, Falter, La Nación, German broadcasters NDR and WDR, and Austrian broadcaster ORF, and eventually many others.[51] Ultimately, “reporters at 100 news media outlets working in 25 languages had used the documents” to investigate individuals and organizations associated with Mossack Fonseca.[2]

Security factored into a number of project management considerations. Saying his life was in danger,[52] John Doe insisted that reporters communicate over encrypted channels only and agree that they would never meet face-to-face.[53][54][55]

SZ also had concerns about security, not only for their source, the leaked documents, and their data, but also for the safety of some of their partners in the investigation living under corrupt regimes who might not want their money-handling practices made public. They stored the data in a room with limited physical access on air gapped computers that were never connected to the Internet. The Guardian also limited access to its journalists’ project work area. To make it even harder to sabotage the computers or steal their drives, SZ journalists made them more tamper-evident by painting the screws holding the drives in place with glitter nail polish.[56]

Reporters sorted the documents into a huge file structure containing a folder for each shell company, which held the associated emails, contracts, transcripts, and scanned documents Mossack Fonseca had generated while doing business with the company or administering it on a client’s behalf.[50] Some 4.8 million leaked files were emails, 3 million were database entries, 2.2 million PDFs, 1.2 million images, 320,000 text files, and 2242 files in other formats.[50][57]

Journalists indexed the documents using open software packages Apache Solr and Apache Tika,[58] and accessed them by means of a custom interface built on top of Blacklight.[58][59] Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters also used Nuix for this, which is proprietary software donated by an Australian company also named Nuix.[60]

Using Nuix, Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters performed optical character recognition (OCR) processing on the millions of scanned documents, making the data they contained become both searchable and machine-readable. Most project reporters then used Neo4J and Linkurious[58] to extract individual and corporate names from the documents for analysis, but some who had access to Nuix used it for this as well.[60] Reporters then cross-referenced the compiled lists of people against the processed documents,[50] then analyzed the information, trying to connect people, roles, monetary flow, and structure legality.[50]

US banking and SEC expert David P. Weber assisted journalists in reviewing information from the Panama Papers.[61]

Additional stories were released based on this data, and the full list of companies was released in early May 2016.[62] The ICIJ later announced the release on May 9, 2016 of a searchable database containing information on over 200,000 offshore entities implicated in the Panama Papers investigation and more than 100,000 additional companies implicated in the 2013 Offshore Leaks investigation.[63] Mossack Fonseca asked the ICIJ not to publish the leaked documents from its database. “We have sent a cease and desist letter,” the company said in a statement.[64]

The sheer quantity of leaked data greatly exceeds the WikiLeaks Cablegate leak in 2010[50] (1.7 GB),[65] Offshore Leaks in 2013 (260 GB), the 2014 Lux Leaks (4 GB), and the 3.3 GB Swiss Leaks of 2015. For comparison, the 2.6 TB of the Panama Papers equals approximately 2,660 GB.

Data security[edit]

Mossack Fonseca notified its clients on April 1, 2016 that it had sustained an email hack. Mossack Fonseca also told news sources that the company had been hacked and always operated within the law.[66]

Data security experts noted, however, that the company had not been encrypting its emails[58] and furthermore seemed to have been running a three-year-old version of Drupal with several known vulnerabilities.[58] According to James Sanders of TechRepublic, Drupal ran on the Apache 2.2.15 version from March 6, 2010, and worse, the Oracle fork of Apache, which by default allows users to view directory structure.[67]

The network architecture was also inherently insecure; the email and web servers were not segmented from the client database in any way.[68]

Some reports[69] also suggest that some parts of the site may have been running WordPress with an out-of-date version of Revolution Slider, a plugin whose previously-announced vulnerabilities[70] are well-documented.

A grey hat hacker named 1×0123 announced April 12 that Mossack Fonseca’s content management system had not been secured from SQL injection, a well-known database attack vector, and that he had been able to access the customer database because of this.[71]

Computer security expert Chris Kubecka announced May 24, 2016 that the Mossack Fonseca client login portal was running four different government grade remote access trojans (RATs). Kubecka confirmed there were still numerous critical vulnerabilities, too many open ports into their infrastructure and internet access to their archive server due to weak security.[72] Kubecka explained how each data security issue was discovered in detail in a full-length book titled Down the Rabbit Hole: An OSINT Journey.[73]Shodan scan results of Mossack Fonseca’s client login portal breached by RATs

Leak and leak journalism[edit]

Gerard Ryle, director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, called the leak “probably the biggest blow the offshore world has ever taken because of the extent of the documents”.[74] Edward Snowden described the release in a Twitter message as the “biggest leak in the history of data journalism“.[75] The ICIJ also said that the leak was “likely to be one of the most explosive [leaks of inside information in history] in the nature of its revelations”.[76]

“This is a unique opportunity to test the effectiveness of leaktivism“, said Micah White, co-founder of Occupy, “… the Panama Papers are being dissected via an unprecedented collaboration between hundreds of highly credible international journalists who have been working secretly for a year. This is the global professionalization of leaktivism. The days of WikiLeaks amateurism are over.”[77]

WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic investigative journalist who worked on Cablegate in 2010, said withholding some documents for a time does maximise the leak’s impact, but called for full online publication of the Panama Papers eventually.[78] A tweet from WikiLeaks criticized the decision of the ICIJ to not release everything for ethical reasons: “If you censor more than 99% of the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism by definition.”[79]

People named[edit]

See also: List of people named in the Panama Papers

While offshore business entities are not illegal in the jurisdictions where they are registered, and often not illegal at all, reporters found that some Mossack Fonseca shell corporations seem to have been used for illegal purposes including fraud, kleptocracy, tax evasion and evading international sanctions.

Reports from April 3 note the law firm’s many connections to high-ranking political figures and their relatives, as well as celebrities and business figures.[3][80][81] Among other things, the leaked documents illustrate how wealthy individuals, including public officials, can keep personal financial information private.

Initial reports identified five then-heads of state or government leaders from Argentina, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates as well as government officials, close relatives, and close associates of various heads of government of more than forty other countries. Names of then-current national leaders in the documents include President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, and the Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.[80]

Former heads of state mentioned in the papers include:

  • Argentinian president Mauricio Macri who was president from december 2015 – december 2019. Moreover the moral problem, the oppositers reclaimed illegality because he never put this in his patrimonial declarations. For one of the official source of panama papers: “Macri’s official spokesman Ivan Pavlovsky said that the Argentine president didn’t list Fleg Trading Ltd. as an asset because he had no capital participation in the company. The company, used to participate in interests in Brazil, was related to the family business group. “This is why Maricio Macri was occasionally its director,” he said, reiterating that Macri was not a shareholder.” Mauricio Macri aparece como director una segunda empresa offshore Macri offshore: aparece una segunda empresa del presidente en Panamá | Perfil.com
  • Sudanese president Ahmed al-Mirghani, who was president from 1986–1989 and died in 2008.[80][82]
  • Former Emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani owned Afrodille S.A., which had a bank account in Luxembourg and shares in two South African companies. Al Thani also held a majority of the shares in Rienne S.A. and Yalis S.A., holding a term deposit with the Bank of China in Luxembourg. A relative owned 25 percent of these: Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, Qatar’s former prime minister and foreign minister.[83]

Former prime ministers:

The leaked files identified 61 family members and associates of prime ministers, presidents and kings,[88] including:

Other clients included less-senior government officials and their close relatives and associates, from over forty countries.[80]

Over £10 million of cash from the sale of the gold stolen in the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery was laundered, first unwittingly and later with the complicity of Mossack Fonseca, through a Panamanian company, Feberion Inc. The company was set up on behalf of an unnamed client twelve months after the robbery. The Brinks money was put through Feberion and other front companies, through banks in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Jersey, and the Isle of Man. It issued bearer shares only. Two nominee directors from Sark were appointed to Feberion by Jersey-based offshore specialist Centre Services.[91] The offshore firms recycled the funds through land and property transactions in the United Kingdom.[91] Although the Metropolitan Police Service raided the offices of Centre Services in late 1986 in cooperation with Jersey authorities, and seized papers and two Feberion bearer shares, it wasn’t until 1995 that Brink’s-Mat’s solicitors were finally able to take control of Feberion and the assets.[91]

Actor Jackie Chan is mentioned in the leaked documents as a shareholder in six companies based in the British Virgin Islands.[92]

Client services[edit]

Law firms play a central role in offshore financial operations.[35] Mossack Fonseca is one of the biggest in its field and the biggest financial institutions refer customers to it.[3] Its services to clients include incorporating and operating shell companies in friendly jurisdictions on their behalf.[93] They can include creating “complex shell company structures” that, while legal, also allow the firm’s clients “to operate behind an often impenetrable wall of secrecy”.[21] The leaked papers detail some of their intricate, multilevel, and multinational corporate structures.[94] Mossack Fonseca has acted with global consultancy partners like Emirates Asset Management Ltd, Ryan Mohanlal Ltd, Sun Hedge Invest and Blue Capital Ltd on behalf of more than 300,000 companies, most of them registered in the British Overseas Territories.

Leaked documents also indicate that the firm would also backdate documents on request and, based on a 2007 exchange of emails in the leaked documents, it did so routinely enough to establish a price structure: $8.75 per month in the past.[95] In 2008, Mossack Fonseca hired a 90-year-old British man to pretend to be the owner of the offshore company of Marianna Olszewski, a US businesswoman, “a blatant breach of anti-money laundering rules” according to the BBC.[96]

Sanctioned clients[edit]

See also: Office of Foreign Assets Control, Due diligence, Know your customer, Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering, Politically exposed person, Economic sanctions, and International sanctions

The anonymity of offshore shell companies can also be used to circumvent international sanctions, and more than 30 Mossack Fonseca clients were at one time or another blacklisted by the US Treasury Department, including businesses linked to senior figures in Russia, Syria and North Korea.[97]

Three Mossack Fonseca companies started for clients of Helene Mathieu Legal Consultants were later sanctioned by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Pangates International Corporation was accused in July 2014 of supplying the government of Syria with “a large amount of specialty petroleum products” with “limited civilian application in Syria”. The other two, Maxima Middle East Trading and Morgan Additives Manufacturing Co, and their owners Wael Abdulkarim and Ahmad Barqawi, were said to have “engaged in deceptive measures” to supply oil products to Syria.[98]

Mossack Fonseca also ran six businesses for Rami Makhlouf, cousin of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, despite US sanctions against him.[99] Internal Mossack Fonseca documents show that in 2011 Mossack Fonseca rejected a recommendation by their own compliance team to sever ties to Mr. Makhlouf. They agreed to do so only months later. The firm has said it never knowingly allowed anyone connected with rogue regimes to use its companies.[97]

Frederik Obermaier, co-author of the Panama Papers story and an investigative reporter at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, told Democracy Now: “Mossack Fonseca realised that Makhlouf was the cousin, and they realised that he was sanctioned, and they realised that he’s allegedly one of the financiers of the Syrian regime. And they said, ‘Oh, there is this bank who still does business with him, so we should still keep with him, as well’.”[100]

HSBC also appeared to reassure Mossack Fonseca not only that it was “comfortable” with Makhlouf as a client but suggested there could be a rapprochement with the Assad family by the US. Makhlouf is already known to be a long-standing client of HSBC’s Swiss private bank, holding at least $15 million with it in multiple accounts in 2006.[101] The Panamanian files also show HSBC provided financial services to a Makhlouf company called Drex Technologies, which HSBC said was a company of “good standing”.[101]

DCB Finance, a Virgin Islands-based shell company founded by North Korean banker Kim Chol-sam[102] and British banker Nigel Cowie,[103] also ignored international sanctions and continued to do business with North Korea with the help of the Panamanian firm. The US Treasury Department in 2013 called DCB Finance a front company for Daedong Credit Bank and announced sanctions against both companies for providing banking services to North Korean arms dealer Korea Mining and Development Trading Corporation,[102] attempting to evade sanctions against that country, and helping to sell arms and expand North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme. Cowie said the holding company was used for legitimate business and he was not aware of illicit transactions.[103]

Mossack Fonseca, required by international banking standards to avoid money-laundering or fraudster clients, is, like all banks, supposed to be particularly alert for signs of corruption with politically exposed persons (PEP), in other words, clients who either are or have close ties to government officials. However they somehow failed to turn up any red flags concerning Tareq Abbas even though he shares a family name with the president of Palestine, and sat on the board of directors of a company with four fellow directors the firm did deem PEP because of their ties to Palestinian politics. Yet Mossack Fonseca actually did and documented due diligence research, including a Google search.[104]

Clients of Mossack Fonseca[edit]

Mossack Fonseca has managed more than 300,000 companies over the years.[93] The number of active companies peaked at more than 80,000 in 2009. Over 210,000 companies in twenty-one jurisdictions figure in the leaks. More than half were incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, others in Panama, the Bahamas, the Seychelles, Niue, and Samoa. Mossack Fonseca’s clients have come from more than 100 countries. Most of the corporate clients were from Hong Kong, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Panama, and Cyprus. Mossack Fonseca worked with more than 14,000 banks, law firms, incorporators, and others to set up companies, foundations, and trusts for their clients.[105] Some 3,100 companies listed in the database appear to have ties to US offshore specialists, and 3,500 shareholders of offshore companies list US addresses.[106] Mossack Fonseca has offices in Nevada and Wyoming.[107]

The leaked documents indicate that about US$2 trillion has passed through the firm’s hands.[108] Several of the holding companies that appear in the documents did business with sanctioned entities, such as arms merchants and relatives of dictators, while the sanctions were in place. The firm provided services to a Seychelles company named Pangates International, which the US government believes supplied aviation fuel to the Syrian government during the current civil war, and continued to handle its paperwork and certify it as a company in good standing, despite sanctions, until August 2015.[99]

More than 500 banks registered nearly 15,600 shell companies with Mossack Fonseca, with HSBC and its affiliates accounting for more than 2,300 of the total. Dexia and J. Safra Sarasin of Luxembourg, Credit Suisse from the Channel Islands and the Swiss UBS each requested at least 500 offshore companies for their clients.[105] An HSBC spokesman said, “The allegations are historical, in some cases dating back 20 years, predating our significant, well-publicized reforms implemented over the last few years.”[109]

HeadquartersBankNumber of
foundations
 LuxembourgExperta Corporate & Trust Services (100% subsidiary of BIL)1,659
 LuxembourgBanque J. Safra Sarasin – Luxembourg S.A.963
 GuernseyCredit Suisse Channel Islands Limited918
 MonacoHSBC Private Bank (Monaco) S.A.778
  SwitzerlandHSBC Private Bank (Suisse) S.A.733
  SwitzerlandUBS AG (subsidiary Rue du Rhône in Ginebra)579
 JerseyCoutts & Co Trustees (Jersey) Limited487
 LuxembourgSociété Générale Bank & Trust Luxembourg465
 LuxembourgLandsbanki Luxembourg S.A.404
 GuernseyRothschild Trust Guernsey Limited378
 SpainBanco Santander119
 SpainBBVA19

Responses by Mossack Fonseca[edit]

In response to queries from the Miami Herald and ICIJ, Mossack Fonseca issued a 2,900-word statement listing legal requirements that prevent using offshore companies for tax avoidance and total anonymity, such as FATF protocols which require identifying ultimate beneficial owners of all companies (including offshore companies) before opening any account or transacting any business.

The Miami Herald printed the statement with an editor’s note that said the statement “did not address any of the specific due diligence failings uncovered by reporters”.[110]

On Monday, April 4, Mossack Fonseca released another statement:

The facts are these: while we may have been the victim of a data breach, nothing we’ve seen in this illegally obtained cache of documents suggests we’ve done anything illegal, and that’s very much in keeping with the global reputation we’ve built over the past 40 years of doing business the right way.

Co-founder Ramón Fonseca Mora told CNN that the reports were false, full of inaccuracies and that parties “in many of the circumstances” cited by the ICIJ “are not and have never been clients of Mossack Fonseca”. The firm provided longer statements to ICIJ.[111]

In its official statement April 6,[112] Mossack Fonseca suggested that responsibility for any legal violations might lie with other institutions:

approximately 90% of our clientele is comprised of professional clients … who act as intermediaries and are regulated in the jurisdiction of their business. These clients are obliged to perform due diligence on their clients in accordance with the KYC and AML regulations to which they are subject.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Jürgen Mossack said: “The cat’s out of the bag, so now we have to deal with the aftermath.”[113]

He said the leak was not an “inside job”—the company had been hacked by servers based abroad. It filed a complaint with the Panamanian attorney general’s office.[114]

On April 7, 2016 Mossack resigned from Panama’s Council on Foreign Relations (Conarex),[115][116] even though he was not officially serving at the time.[117] His brother Peter Mossack still serves as honorary Consul of Panama, as he has since 2010.[118][119][120][121]

On May 5, 2016, Mossack Fonseca sent a cease and desist letter to the ICIJ in an attempt to stop the ICIJ from releasing the leaked documents from the Panama Papers scandal.[122] Despite this, the ICIJ released the leaked documents on May 9, 2016.[123][124]

In March 2018, Mossack Fonseca announced it would close down.[125]

In October 2019, The Laundromat, a movie based on the events of the Panama Papers was released on the streaming service Netflix. Prior to this, Mossack and Fonseca issued a lawsuit[126] in aim of preventing the release, citing defamation and potential damage to their rights of a fair trial by jury, should one begin.[127] On July 17, 2019, the judge, based in Connecticut, refused the injunction citing lack of jurisdiction, and ordered the case be transferred to Los Angeles California.[128][126]

Responses in Panama[edit]

At 5:00 am on April 3, as the news first broke, Ramón Fonseca Mora told television channel TVN he “was not responsible nor he had been accused in any tribunal”.[129]

He said the firm was the victim of a hack and that he had no responsibility for what clients did with the offshore companies that they purchased from Mossack Fonseca, which were legal under Panamanian law.[129] Later that day, the Independent Movement (MOVIN)[note 1] called for calm, and expressed hope that the Panamanian justice system would not allow the culprits to go with impunity.[129]

Public officials[edit]

By April 8, the government understood that media reports were addressing tax evasion and that they were not attacking Panama. The president met on Wednesday April 7, with CANDIF, a committee of representatives from different sectors of the economy which includes the Chamber of Commerce, Chamber of Industry and Agriculture, the National Lawyers Association, the International Lawyers Association, the Banking Association and the Stock Exchange, and entered full crisis management mode.[131] On the same day he announced the creation of a new judiciary tribunal and a high-level commission led by Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. There were accusations that foreign forces were attacking Panama because of Panama’s “stable and robust economy”.[132]

Isabel Saint Malo de Alvarado, Vice President of Panama, said in an op-ed piece published April 21 in The Guardian that President Juan Carlos Varela and his administration have strengthened Panama’s controls over money-laundering in the twenty months they have been in power, and that “Panama is setting up an independent commission, co-chaired by the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, to evaluate our financial system, determine best practices, and recommend measures to strengthen global financial and legal transparency. We expect its findings within the next six months, and will share the results with the international community.”[133]

However, in early August 2016, Stiglitz resigned from the committee because he learned that the Panamanian government would not commit to making their final report public. He said that he had always “assumed” that the final report would be transparent.[134]

On April 8, President Varela denounced France’s proposal to return Panama to a list of countries that did not cooperate with information exchange.[135] Minister of the Presidency Alvaro Alemán categorically denied that Panama is a tax haven, and said the country would not be a scapegoat.[136] Alemán said that talks with the French ambassador to Panama had begun.[136]

On April 25, a meeting of the Panamanian and French finance ministers resulted in an agreement under which Panama will provide information to France about French nationals with taxable assets in the country.[137][138]

The Minister of Economy and Finance of Panama, Dulcidio de la Guardia, formerly an offshore specialist at Mossack Fonseca competitor Morgan & Morgan, said the legal but often “murky” niche of establishing offshore accounts, firms and trusts make up “less than half a percentage point” of Panama’s GDP. He appeared to suggest that the publication of the papers was an attack on Panama because of the high level of economic growth that the country had shown.[139]

Eduardo Morgan of the Panamanian firm Morgan & Morgan accused the OECD of starting the scandal to avoid competition from Panama with the interests of other countries.[140] The Panama Papers affect the image of Panama in an unfair manner and have come to light not as the result of an investigation, but of a hack, said Adolfo Linares, president of the Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture of Panama (Cciap).[141]

The Colegio Nacional de Abogados de Panama (CNA) urged the government to sue.[142] Political analyst Mario Rognoni said that the world perceives Panama as a tax haven. The government of President Juan Carlos Varela might become implicated if he tries to cover up for those involved, Rognoni said.[143]

Economist Rolando Gordon said the affair hurts Panama, which has just emerged from the greylist of the FATF, and added that each country, especially Panama, must conduct investigations and determine whether illegal or improper acts were committed.[144]

Panama’s Lawyers Movement called the Panama Papers leak “cyber bullying” and in a press conference condemned it as an attack on the ‘Panama’ brand. Fraguela Alfonso, its president, called it a direct attack on the country’s financial system.

I invite all organized forces of the country to create a great crusade for the rescue of the country’s image.

The law firm Rubio, Álvarez, Solís & Abrego also reacted and in a press release said that “In recent decades Panama has been in the most important financial and service centers of Latin America and the entire world. As a result, all kinds of attacks on our service system have been attempted.”[145]

Offshore companies are legal, said Panamanian lawyer and former controller of the republic Alvin Weeden; illegality arises when they are used for money laundering, arms smuggling, terrorism, or tax evasion.[146]

On October 19, 2016, it became known that a government executive had spent 370 million U.S. dollars in order to “clean” the country’s image.[147]

On October 22, 2016, during a state visit to Germany, Varela told journalist Jenny Pérez, of Deutsche Welle that there had been “progress” in transparency and many agreements to exchange tax information, and that tax evasion was a global problem. Asked about his ties with Ramón Fonseca Mora, managing partner of the firm Mossack Fonseca, he acknowledged that he is a friend.[148]

Law enforcement[edit]

The Procuraduría de la Nación announced that it would investigate Mossack Fonseca and the Panama papers.[149] On April 12, the newly formed Second Specialized Prosecutor against Organized Crime raided Mossack Fonseca and searched their Bella Vista office as part of the investigation initiated by the Panama Papers. The Attorney General’s office issued a press release following the raid, which lasted 27 hours,[150] stating that the purpose was “to obtain documents relevant to the information published in news articles that establishes the possible use of the law firm in illegal activities”.[151] The search ended without measures against the law firm, confirmed prosecutor Javier Caraballo of the Second Prosecutor Against Organized Crime.[152]

On April 22 the same unit raided another Panama location and “secured a large amount of evidence”.[150]

The Municipality of Regulation and Supervision of Financial Subjects [not the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF)] initiated a special review of the law firm Mossack Fonseca to determine whether it had followed tax law. Carlamara Sanchez, in charge of this proceeding, said at a press conference that the quartermaster had come to verify whether the firm had complied since April 8 with due diligence, customer knowledge, the final beneficiary and reporting of suspicious transactions to Financial Analysis Unit (UAF) operations. She said that Law 23 of 2015 empowers regulation and supervision and said some firms had been monitored since late last year with special attention after the Panama Papers, and noted that the law carries fines $5,000 to $1 million or even suspension of the firm.[153]

The ICIJ investigation of Mossack Fonseca was reported to the Public Ministry. Samid Dan Sandoval, former candidate for mayor of Santiago de Veraguas (2014), filed the legal action against the journalists and all those who had participated. He said the project name damaged the integrity, dignity and sovereignty of the country and that the consortium would have to assume legal responsibility for all damage caused to the Panamanian nation.[154]

A Change.org petition requested the ICIJ stop using the name of Panama as in the Panama Papers. The request said the generally- accepted name for the investigation “damage(d) the image” of Panama.[155]

Suspension of investigation[edit]

Attorney General of Panama Kenia Isolda Porcell Diaz announced on January 24, 2017 that he was suspending the investigations against Mossack Fonseca because it filed an appeal for protection of constitutional rights before the First Superior Court of Justice of Panama and requested that he deliver all the original documents to issue a judgment.[156][157][158][clarification needed]

Charges[edit]

Mossack and Fonseca were detained February 8, 2017 on money-laundering charges.[159]

Demise of Mossack Fonseca[edit]

In March 2018, Mossack Fonseca announced that it would cease operations at the end of March due to “irreversible damage” to their image as a direct result of the Panama Papers.[160]

Allegations, reactions, and investigations[edit]

Main article: Reactions to the Panama Papers

Europe[edit]

Main article: Panama Papers (Europe)

Asia[edit]

Main article: Panama Papers (Asia)

North America[edit]

Main article: Panama Papers (North America)

South America[edit]

Main article: Panama Papers (South America)

Africa[edit]

Main article: Panama Papers (Africa)

Former South African president Thabo Mbeki, head of the African Union‘s panel on illicit financial flows, on April 9 called the leak “most welcome” and called on African nations to investigate the citizens of their nations who appear in the papers. His panel’s 2015 report[161] found that Africa loses $50 billion a year due to tax evasion and other illicit practices and its 50-year losses top a trillion dollars. Furthermore, he said, the Seychelles, an African nation, is the fourth most mentioned tax haven in the documents.[162]

Oceania[edit]

Australia[edit]

On April 22, 2016, Australia said it would create a public register showing the beneficial, or actual, owners of shell companies, as part of an effort to stamp out tax avoidance by multinational corporations.[163]

The Australian Taxation Office has announced that it is investigating 800 individual Australian taxpayers on the Mossack Fonseca list of clients and that some of the cases may be referred to the country’s Serious Financial Crime Task Force.[164] Eighty names match to an organized crime intelligence database.[165]

Leaked documents examined by the ABC “pierced the veil of anonymous shell companies” and linked a Sydney businessman and a Brisbane geologist to mining deals in North Korea.[166] “Rather than applying sanctions, the Australian Government and the ASX seem to have allowed a coach and horses to be ridden through them by the people involved in forming this relationship, corporate relationship with one of the primary arms manufacturers in North Korea,” said Thomas Clark of the University of Technology Sydney.[166]

David Sutton was director of AAT Corporation and EHG Corporation when they held mineral licenses in North Korea and did business with Korean Natural Resources Development and Investment Corporation, which is under United Nations sanctions, and North Korea’s “primary arms dealer and main exporter of goods and equipment related to ballistic missiles and conventional weapons, responsible for approximately half of the arms exported by North Korea.”[166] The geologist, Louis Schurmann, said British billionaire Kevin Leech was key to putting the deal together.[166] Leaked documents also reveal the involvement of another Briton, Gibraltar-based John Lister.[166] According to ABC, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was aware of these mining deals, which had also been brought up in the Australian Senate, but nobody ever referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police.[166]

On May 12, 2016, the names of former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull, and former Premier of New South Wales Neville Wran, were both found in the Panama Papers, due to the pair’s former directorship of the Mossack Fonseca-incorporated company Star Technology Systems Limited. Turnbull and Wran resigned from these positions in 1995, and the Prime Minister has denied any impropriety, stating “had [Star Technology] made any profits—which it did not regrettably—it certainly would have paid tax in Australia.”[167]

Cook Islands[edit]

Media initially reported that the Panama Papers lists 500 entities created under the jurisdiction of the Cook Islands, population 10,000, almost as many as Singapore, whose population is 5.7 million.[168] After the Winebox affair, the Cook Islands gave New Zealand jurisdiction over tax matters.[169]

New Zealand[edit]

New Zealand’s Inland Revenue Department said that they were working to obtain details of people who have tax residence in the country who may have been involved in arrangements facilitated by Mossack Fonseca.[170] Gerard Ryle, director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, told Radio New Zealand on April 8, 2016 that New Zealand is a well-known tax haven and a “nice front for criminals”.[171] New Zealand provides overseas investors with foreign trusts and look-through companies. New Zealand government policy is to not request disclosure of the identity of either the settlor or the beneficiaries of the trust, and thus the ownership remains secret, and as a consequence, thus hiding the assets from the trust-holder’s home jurisdictions. These trusts are not taxed in New Zealand. These trusts can then be used to acquire and own New Zealand registered companies, which become a vehicle by which the trust owners can exercise day to day control over their assets. These New Zealand-registered companies can be designed not to make a profit using loans from tax havens and other profit shifting techniques: the result being tax free income with the general respectability that has typically been associated with companies registered in New Zealand.

Prime Minister John Key responded May 7 to John Doe‘s remark that he had been “curiously quiet” about tax evasion in the Cook Islands by saying that the whistleblower was confused and probably European. While the Cook Islands use New Zealand currency, “I have as much responsibility for tax in the Cook Islands as I do for taxing Russia.” New Zealand does represent the Cook Islands on defence and foreign policy, but not taxation, he said.[172]

In distancing New Zealand from the Cook Islands, Key ignored the close ties between the two countries and the crucial role New Zealand had in setting up the Cook Island taxation system.[173]

Niue[edit]

Mossack Fonseca approached Niue in 1996 and offered to help set up a tax haven on the tiny South Sea island. The law firm drafted the necessary legislation, permitting offshore companies to operate in total secrecy. They took care of all the paperwork, the island got a modest fee for each filing, and it seemed like quite a deal, even if they were required by law now to provide all banking paperwork in Russian and Chinese as well as English.[174]

Soon the filings almost covered the island’s year budget. The US government however made official noises in 2001 about laundering criminal proceeds and Chase Bank blacklisted the island and Bank of New York followed suit. This caused inconvenience to the population so they let their contract with Mossack Fonseca expire and many of the privacy-seekers on the banking world moved on.[174] Some did stay however, apparently; the Panama Papers database lists nearly 10,000 companies and trusts set up on Niue, population 1200.[168]

Samoa[edit]

Many recently created shell companies were set up in Samoa, perhaps after Niue revised its tax laws. The Panama Papers database lists more than 13,000 companies and trusts set up there. Samoa has a population of roughly 200,000.[168]

FIFA investigation[edit]

On May 27, 2015, the US Department of Justice indicted a number of companies and individuals for conspiracy, corruption and racketeering in connection with bribes and kickbacks paid to obtain media and marketing rights for FIFA tournaments. Some immediately entered guilty pleas.[175]

Among those indicted were Jeffrey Webb and Jack Warner, the current and former presidents of CONCACAF, the continental confederation under FIFA headquartered in the United States. They were charged with racketeering and bribery offenses. Others were US and South American sports marketing executives who paid and agreed to pay well over $150 million in bribes and kickbacks.[175]

On December 12, 2014, José Hawilla, the owner and founder of the Traffic Group, the Brazilian sports marketing conglomerate, waived indictment and pleaded guilty to a four-count information charging him with racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Hawilla also agreed to forfeit over $151 million, $25 million of which was paid at the time of his plea.[175]

Torneos & Traffic (T&T) is a subsidiary of Fox International Channels since 2005[176] (with investments since 2002) and is the same company involved in corrupt practices in the acquisition of rights to major South American soccer tournaments.[177][178]‘

Many individuals mentioned in the Panama Papers are connected with the world governing body of association football, FIFA, including the former president of CONMEBOL Eugenio Figueredo;[179] former President of UEFA Michel Platini;[180] former secretary general of FIFA Jérôme Valcke;[180] Argentine player for Barcelona Lionel Messi; and, from Italy, the head manager of Metro, Antonio Guglielmi.[179]

The leak also revealed an extensive conflict of interest between a member of the FIFA Ethics Committee and former FIFA vice president Eugenio Figueredo.[179] Swiss police searched the offices of UEFA, European football’s governing body, after the naming of former secretary-general Gianni Infantino as president of FIFA. He had signed a television deal while he was at UEFA with a company called Cross Trading, which the FBI has since accused of bribery. The contract emerged among the leaked documents. Infantino has denied wrongdoing.[181]

Recovered sums from litigations, fines and back taxes[edit]

In April 2019, the ICIJ and European newspapers reported that the global tally of such payments exceeded one billion USD, and is now at 1.2 billion. In comparison, Great Britain recovered the largest position (253 million), followed by Denmark (237 million), Germany (183 million), Spain (164 million), France (136 million) and Australia (93 million). Colombia with 89 million recuperated the highest amount for South and Central American countries, which were heavily involved in the financial scandal. While investigations are ongoing in Austria, Canada and Switzerland, and more payments are to be expected, many countries are conducting continued inspections of companies and private individuals revealed in the report.[182][183]

0

The World to Come, ACT 1. Scene 6.

SIX

At a Tavern on Ludlow Street

“A SCHOOL FOR ALCOHOLISM”  

The Tavern is open for business officially only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Though typically and unofficially there are underground lap dancing parties happening late Wednesday night in the basement.  The lights are kept dim no matter what happens. You need that to hide subtle stains from fluids. You can dance all night if you have to, but eventually someone has to herd the cats out the door and hide the bodies on the floor. The Mehanata Social Club is tucked away discreetly on 113 Ludlow Street on the lower east side of Manhattan. This is their second location. Numerous police raids and finally a raid which transformed into a brawling melee succeeded in burning to the ground the original location on Canal and Broadway. In an ugly incident that took place in 2005 the lights of the “Bulgarian Bar and Cultural Society” briefly went out. The new location is about six times the size over three levels. Surely it will not be the final location, given the tumultuous nature of the existing times. Sasho the owner has already begun planning an even larger Breuklyn location, a whore house in Kiev with the same name and a ‘School for Alcoholism’ in upstate New York.

At an infamous establishment such as this you ought to always know the names of the men standing watch or the women pouring your drinks. Or the people holding down of your bags and coats. Most importantly you ought to be cautious of the seductive forces marshaled via awkwardly inexpensive liquor and the black magic to lead you to things you ought not to be playing around with. Such as foreign persons in needs of papers. Or creatures that drink blood.

There might was well be signs on the wall telling you anything not tied down will be carried away into the night, your bags, your souls, and virginities of nearly every kind. Come to think of it, there are such overt signs hanging everywhere! Literal not figurative signs. One claims three teeth are needed for entry. One says anything not checked will be stolen. One says “get naked get a shot, get fucked on the bar win a bottle”. That is hardly a bluff, but the bottle is never top shelf stuff.

It’s a ‘Gypsy Bar’, they claim to the public which sometimes romanticizes Gypsies, but often does not. But Gypsy’s all steal. Gypsy’s will trick you with music and some dance, lure you for tarot cards and then steal you internal organs and you will wake up in an ice bath in Bratislava missing some elements internally, then die of blood loss. The name of this place literally means ‘the Tavern’ in Bulgarian. And it lives up to that designation splendidly.

You wouldn’t find it unless you were looking for it. The entrance isn’t loud and the clamor inside is well insulated by its system of layers. The Lower East Side area is a drinking dancing seven day a week shit show anyway for university students and the children of the upper middle classes. Mehanata is the club of choice for New York’s newly arrived undocumented immigrants from South America, Central America and the former Soviet Union. You’d only be looking for it if someone told you about it. Perhaps you’d hate them for it later, but very few people are not amused the very first time. There never is just a first time. But, in the New York wilderness a tavern of eclectic wilding foreigners and untamed domestic people dancing to the tunes of South America, the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and the Roma can draw to it both angels and demons by word of mouth. Since 2000 it has been surviving pogroms, police raids and venue changes via fire. The police department is doing everything in their human power from keeping the Breuklyn location from obtaining a liquor license. Sasho has been trying to open it for three of four years it seems.Who is Sasho? He’s of course the boss.

There are three floors to the Tavern. The website extols patrons to “meet their future green card holding spouse.” There is live Mestizo music. Live fire juggling. Bulgarian contortionists on Thursday alongside with Bordel Dali. Rafael and his business comrade Georgie who is from Bucharest, Romania. Or maybe he just says that knowing no Americans know any other cities there.

“But I’m not freaking Gypsy!” he declares. He’s getting a PhD in Computer science. His specialization, the tracking of petrol futures purchasing and predicting in relation to major airlines. The cast of characters around here boggles the mind.

The club has the look of a vast lawless pirate ship or a wilderness brothel. It is sometimes dim red and under the cloth tarps of the upper galley level which looks down with little tables in the dance floor. The main floor has a dance floor, a bar and a kitchen. The downstairs has stripper poles, blue light, a bar and an Ice Cage.

The Ice Cage has bottles of wall to wall Vodka, which is all the same Vodka, but when people pay $40 to enter the cage and slam that wall to wall Vodka orgy in Soviet officer uniforms; they don’t notice. Vodka drinkers of repute, do not go in the Ice Cage, which also sits above a hatch to the abandoned railways under lower Manhattan. So one can walk or take a private train to Breuklyn or New Jersey. That is also why the place is only officially open Thursday through Saturday, to facilitate that traffic.

The waitresses and bar tenders are skinny or shapely, all Post-Soviet Bucharest or Sophia girls just arrived recently though generally well educated and for now, un-indentured. Some claim they are ‘from Moscow’. But they are not from Moscow at all. They are from shitty little Eastern European towns no one has ever heard of. They mostly don’t stay long and the reason for that is partly because of the mental and physical demands of the work and because their boss is the devil himself. The club is only open Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Things that go on during the week here are private and mostly didn’t even ever happen. There are private parties in the basement you’d do well not to crash unexpected or uninvited. Like the one on Wednesdays which is sort of high stakes a gang bang contest. There have been cock fights, dog fights and also bear fights. There are a lot of meetings happening upstairs right before the place fills up in Eastern European languages that you’d do well not to hear.  The musical talent is highly various. Normally three or four live acts a night on Friday and Saturday. A lot of live horns. There’s a rather Pall Mall esthetic of transcontinental bacchanalia.

The booking agent for Music is petite and elegant Viktoria Lynch often wearing the hat of a Soviet officer the shoulder length locks of her hair falling over well fashioned skirts or flowing dresses. She was born in the Catskills, but has recently gotten her New Yorker residency card much to her delight; eight years later. The primary live acts are Gypsy Jazz, Spanish Ska and Balkan mostly. Roma meets Latin American for the most part. You get dance hall and reggae tone periodically from the Selectors, but for the most part ‘the brothers’ stay out of the place. The doughty wine happens, but as international as everything remains, there are almost never black people at Mehanata. Which no one has a problem with except maybe Kawa Zivistan who keeps bringing them there? But, they have one drink and politely leave after meetings. For some reason the charms of the venue are lost on the brothers.

Since 2001 the Z.O.B. has made Mehanata its unofficial office and also its social club. It’s meeting spot and its drinking spot. Sasho allows all kinds of people to meet under his roof and being there has connected the movement to darker things. There is a power the club has to draw in the very worst and best of people. Mehanata is thus a fitting place for the Z.O.B. leaders to draw towards since many of the group are hardly saints. Its members are generally able to lumped into the categories of ambulance workers, criminals, sex workers and also some leftist radicals. Sometimes a cadre is two or more of those things.

The Balsa, the Wango, Rumbia, sometimes even a little Zouk are played by the various selectors, but ‘the brothers’ always immediately depart when the meetings are over. No one can say exactly why they don’t like the place, but they really don’t. But as it is a central location for all five boroughs, it’s remained an unchallenged haunt.

Sasho and Kawa allegedly go all the way back to 2001, but they don’t always remember or talk about all the events in between. The most popular disk jockeys are Raphael Rafael Contreras Lynch also called Selector Rafflex and Georgie from Bucharest also called ‘Selector Mishto’. As stated Romanian but “not a fucking Gypsy”. Recently booked is the bearded, crazy eyed Serb Adrian Jankovitch. The most famous of the current bartenders is moxy Martina Hella Dubreskaya. She has been here a good deal longer than the others. A black haired Bulgarian journalist, music blogger and BDSM enthusiast. She has the special constitution that a bartender needs to work the shit show around here longer than a month. Though many suspect she will quit soon. Perhaps go into Real Estate. Martina smiles at everyone in hate. She is technically speaking the first person to publish the work of Kawa Zivistan by putting his sad poems on her website. She regrets that she encourages him, but secretly likes some of his work.

Outside and inside is James Burns the feisty retired Fenian cop on ¾’s pension. They call him James White, because he’s white. After his ACL was torn chasing down a perp he retired to bouncer work. His partner is James Behemoth Brown Pererez a smart talking, burly Mestizo from the Bronx. They call him James Brown, because he’s Mestizo. Always outside is Slavi the stone faced brother of Sasho, but no one trusts they’re actually brothers. Until sneaking a sly grin the Bulgarian strong man collects people’s papers, cans their IDs and directs them to be retina scanned via this Illubadori device at the door which biometrixes all the guests. He collects the cash or the directs drunk patrons to use the external ATM which charges an extortionist ten dollar service fee, the highest almost in New York actually. The irregular admission charge never gets a smile, because Slavi doesn’t charge people he knows in money. Then he sneaks a sly happy grin, has a quick smoke and sometimes, only sometimes asks people for money to come inside wearing a black Soviet wolf fur ushanka hat except during the summer.

You should pay cash up front for everything. Unless you’re a card carrying regular. Giving them your credit card is simply a horrible idea. It means you’ll just keep drinking and very often, leave without your card. James White and James Brown are sometimes easy going on admission for just about anyone not over weight and female. The regulars never pay. The various mob tough guys never pay. The Z.O.B. members never ever pay. Sexy young girls never ever pay. The endless Korean bachelorette parties never pay except to ride the Gypsy Bus. The guests of regulars, mobsters, musicians, D.J.s, rebels and girlfriends of friends never pay. It’s between 15-35 dollars though if you’re just sort of showing up. Except on Thursday when everyone is in for free.

James White, James Brown and Slavi sometimes have to get fierce quick to squash the brawls which happen, generally around 2 AM, generally instigated by the Albanians, but often before and after. They can’t seem to keep the Albanians from breaking people’s faces over stupid things. But that’s part of their cultural charm some say.

Justin Toomey O’Azzello is ‘the General Manager’. He is full blood Fenian and has ‘wandering hands’ people say. He is quite jovial and likes to tell elaborate stories about his days in the Air Force flying bombing missions over former Yugoslavia. He blames his flirtations with alcoholism over the years on bombing runs he inflicted over Bosnia. But Justin was never in the air force or ever in Bosnia. His hands do wander though. Recently he has taken up painting. Some say he’s Sasho’s top Capo.

The owner of this place is a fearsome Bulgarian half Ukrainian Ivory named Sasho, but is real name is Alexander Dmitrievich Perchevney. He was born in Kiev, lived in Belaya Tserkov, Ukraine and moved to Sophia, Bulgaria before arriving here in 1992. He used to be a dentist. He used to be a person of importance in the now defunct U.S.S.R., in the Inner Party. He thus has something of soft spot for revolutionists. The debaucheries of fallen men too. As well as a hard spot for undocumented woman of theatre. Misha Kishbivalli, the long haired millionaire playboy from Georgia also is his silent partner. No one ever knows of asks what Misha does for a living. But the answer is blood diamonds. The Mehanata “cooks” are all from the tropic of Capricorn but nothing is ever very good eat except the beet soup or the Bulgarian salad; cucumbers, tomatoes, onions and pepper and white cheese. The feta cheese over fries is pretty safe too. Some type of Borscht which is rumored to sometimes contain menstrual blood. The pork dishes are outright made of people.

Sasho’s wife Tanya isn’t the cook anymore. It’s always undocumented Mexicans Sasho brings on over the years through the under tunnels. They say the Breuklyn venue, when it opens, will have ‘traditional Bulgarian food’, but no one knows what that means exactly. Tanya is not a vindictive person, but she cannot stand this ‘so-called Kawa Zivistan’. There is very valid reason for that contempt, beyond him being something of a trouble maker. They have history in other lives.

“Stop cooking people and more people would eat here,” Kawa once suggested.

“Stop being a fucking Democratic Confederalist, Blat and Daria will perhaps date you, yet again,” was Tanya’s response.

It is rumored, also that there is vast tunnel system running from under the Tavern to multiple places unknown. Some nights, Misha Kishbivalli has pontificated outside of the club with clearly manic eyes that an ‘American engineered mega tunnel system runs under the entire country in case of insurgency, general emergency or nuclear winter.’ The traffic around here is always hard to predict. ‘Of course I’ve been to camps’ Misha exclaims, ‘let me tell you, one time I followed the tunnels all the way back to Bulgaria!’

There are tall glass pitchers of apple cider ginger vodka that sit atop the bar, sitting there for haShem only knows how long. There is a sign informing people that “get naked get a shot, get fucked win a bottle” and people seem to win all the time. Also the rule that patrons ‘must have at least three teeth to enter the establishment’, that is untrue. You just need to have cash money. Preferably American type. Or be vouched for by a regular. But, things are always pretty fucking negotiable.

The music is playing loud at the Mehanata Social Club where Daria Andreavna makes eyes then orders a Vodka based energy drink confection. She then slides up to Kawa at the bar. He is wearing a black suit this time. A week since his death, no one acknowledges or recognizes them.

“I thought you were dead,” Kawa says.

“Martyrs never die,” Daria replies and she winks.

“It seems that we have found each other again,” she whispers.

“You completely misbehaved I dare tell you,” he says, “you got us both killed yet again. This time for true bullshit.”

“I was bad. Bored? Rude should I say? I am told, the other night, I insulted your hospitality, greatly.”

“That you certainly did.”

“What are you drinking,” she asks.

“Astika,” he replies. The Bulgarian beer that is never in stock, hasn’t been in stock since 2001, but he always asks for it. Knowing they one squirreled away.

She catches Martina’s attention, and get him his drink. Martina winks at her. One man’s hot commodity, still is the cheapest drink in the house. 

“So,” she whispers again, “Cheers. I have no memory of anything last weekend. Forgive me for that. I don’t even know what I did. Or didn’t do, might have done.”

“You remember nothing?”

She just gives him a coy but devilish smirk. And she shakes her head.

“I drink a lot for fun. I don’t always remember my Friday or my Saturday nights. Outside work, where I also drink the week gets interrupted by school, and then I party hard on the days off. I was told I was really bad to you. So, I’m saying the sorry. For the being of bad. What are you really drinking? This is our custom. Astika is shit,” she says.

“Nothing? No recollection?”

“No nothing at all. Oh, okay,” she smiles at him, “you were wearing a suit that’s a different color from the suit you’re wearing now, this I remember.”

Kawa is now in a black suit. The night she almost killed them last it was white linen. It’s almost always a cheap suit or a blue uniform with him.

“You never acted all that drunkenly. You were calm and in control throughout, your, shall I say, outbursts. My friends have told me that it’s too late to stop your vodka calamities from unfolding sometimes. But, you nearly killed us. And you bit me,” he says showing her the red ring around his index left finger.

“Well we all have our demons in there, don’t we? I’m good at drinking. Until I sometimes fall down. I fell down those steps one night,” she says pointing to a long downstairs plummet into the downstairs floor where the Ice Cage is hidden.

The Ice Cage is a freezer box in the basement where people pay forty a head to slam wall to wall cheap vodka over a period of two minutes. It never ends well for those who get in that cage. There is perilous flight of stairs down to the basement where they keep the stripper poles and the blue lit fuck cage by a second bar and dance floor.

“That looks like if would hurt,” he replies, “if you remembered it”.

“I don’t remember it,” she smiles wide and seductively.

But that’s a silly thing to say. Seductively. Dasha is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Her proclivity for homicide aside, she is fascinating. Describing just how beautiful she is almost doesn’t fit in a later play he could end up writing. Her golden locks are like a lioness. Her eyes are capable of quick swing between fierce, curious and loving. She loves to hear men say it, how beautiful she is, but beauty isn’t where a man falls from when he falls from the heart not the groin. Beauty is a thing of lust. It has no bearing on love when that love is real love and not lust with imagined feelings. Love is energy, a wave crashing over you. Kawa has drowned several times before. He’d be very careful to use the word again. In that regard he is reckless to no end. He feels an attraction and can’t comprehend it, must be love. Previous formula for the same emotion dictated that whatever woman resisted his affections the most adamantly and then let down her guard to an elegant seduction of deeds and art, must be love. There were loves at first sight, or interaction as well as friendships that became romances and he was unafraid to say the words again. The words often came out without his permission.

Overtime several women had accused him of bastardizing the loaded phrase via serial usage. There were over a dozen women he’d uttered it to over the course of his 28 years. Generally after the conquest of kisses, but to a couple stupidly even before.

They were all very different women of course and they all brought out very different rolls to his emotional dice. Sides to his coin being a limited idiom. Supposedly in popular fictions man or woman is supposed to have only one true love in a lifetime, to marry them or be parted from them tragically. So Kawa was working hard by that standard, which truly in real life it can never be that simple, that limited.

“You’re really something to write about,” he says.

“Absolutely I am. And I never say sorry to men, but Rafael said he would cancel his friendship with me if I didn’t say sorry to you. Apparently I underestimated that you are the favorite host. The dashing revolutionary saint. The darling also of the owner. The grandeismo! Wait, I’m not sure what that word means blat! You’re great. Also as the confidant of Rafael Rafael and Viktoria, you should become my confidant too.”

“I’m just Kawa on my good nights.”

“And on the bad nights? Tell me some of your other names,” she whispers.

“Zachariah, Valera or Vasyli Pveada, or, wait, wait, my memory is growing back, perhaps your papers really say: Sebastian Adonaev! Ha! A royal victory? Where did you concoct these strange and slightly atrocious monikers? Moniker, is that the right word?”

He nods slightly.

“I’m Kawa when the drinks flow and the desire to dance returns to my hard hips. All other times I’m at war. With myself and my nature, with a world of sheep and a den of wolves. In such circumstances I require a hard Russian name, and the luck of a royal victory.”

“Hmm. Well it sounds ridiculous the way you say it. I’ll call you Valera, highly  sparingly, it’s an insult you know! Some girl insulted you and you made it your Russian name. We can get you a new on. But, Kawa is okay too. I’ll see what rolls better off tongue. All that other stuff, well I have no idea what you’re talking about.

“Martina, two shots, Russian Standard please,” Daria proclaims dropping another twenty on the bar. Martina the bartender comes over and gives Dasha a little wink again. She pours them out.

“This is sorry alright,” she smiles “I have said the words sorry! Now I again reserve the right to be rude to you and forget about it later. Fair game, yes? You got two drinks.”

He looks deep into her blue eyes and gives a half smile wondering how much she really remembers. In her eyes he sees someone looking out at him below the swagger of her posture, behind her beauty is a much older beauty.  

“Well aren’t you impressed with my new manners?” she asks

I find you quite a bit stunning, he thinks and almost says.

“Of course I am.”

“What are you drinking next?” she asks.

They clink the shots and she proclaims, “Nazdrovia!”

She drinks like a fish, but really she just drinks like a Russian.

“Astika,” she orders for him.

She has years of recent training in anticipating the needs of men. By realizing those needs controlling them. And she thinks, what terrible piss but of course she orders him another one from Martina. The raven black haired Bulgarian bartender who knows exactly what she’s doing. Since Daria never buys men drinks. Because Russian apologies are based on acts not words.

“Are you coming to our little festival?” Daria asks him almost casually.

There will be a four day Bohemian Festival happening Labor Day Weekend where all manner of fuckery will take place in a park in Queens called the Onderdonk Public Historic Fields. Sasho the owner had let Victoria allow Kawa do a benefit concert for their Haiti efforts at Mehanata a month ago. So a week from now Kawa and his E.M.T., Paramedic in training comrade Jared Forgetter from Kalifornia will be freelance E.M.T.s covering the first two days of festival.

“Wait,” she pauses.

“You are working the festival as our paramedic,” she says as she presses her palm to his side burn and face side.

“Sharp as a dagger you are dorogaia,” he smirks.

She smiles with big bright eyes. Who the fuck taught you that word, she thinks.

“Don’t call me dear ever again, I’m not so old! I’ll alert you that I may well come to some of that festival and if I fall down, drunk, I will ask for very intimate and professional service.”

“Hand pressed ice,” he promises reaching for her waist then thinking again.

“Hand pressed everything,” she demands.

“It’s at the service of all attending,” he declares.

“You are a true servant of the people,” she mocks with a wink.

“Dasha, you’re a tough act to follow.”

“You’re gonna keep calling me that are you?”

“That a problem?”

“It’s rather intimate, I don’t know if we know each other like this or that.”

“Well I suppose we can work on that over festival.”

She smiles a lovely, practiced smile.

Kawa, or whatever stupid name you’re calling yourself tonight. Press me best you can. The risk is completely yours not mine.”

A song about the great and noble Commandant Che Guevara by the Buena Vista Social Club comes on and she thrusts herself into his arms for a last dance. They take the floor to themselves.

“I knew you back in Cuba,” she whispers in his ear.

“I’ve never been to Cuba,” he replies with a stone face.

She Latin sashays with him across the dance floor muscling out the other couples with her buxom way. She’s part crass and part wonderful. She lets him lead and he does a fairly good job under pressure to keep up. It’s been over a year since he’s danced with a woman of any substance.

“You dance like you’re actually from the Caribbean,” she says to him.

“But I’ve never been to Cuba,” he repeats.

He dips her slightly. She’s a gorgeous powerful woman who will always get what she wants in the end so it seems. Except perhaps happiness which no power or money can so far buy.

“You’ve gotten much better at playing an Amerikansky radical,” she tells him in Ivory language. “You are even at better at playing a Russian courtesan,” he replies and they dance the rest of the night.

It is past 4 am now and efforts begin to clear the worst kind of rabble out the tavern have begun. Only card carrying regulars and lovers of staff can remain and light things up or pound things down. It’s now with the storm shudders sealed just over two dozen left lingering around the bar. Smoke them if you got them. They count out the cash on the bar. For some reason, with almost no music, drunk as hell, Kawa and Daria are still dancing. Slumped into each other.

“Right never on schedule,” says Justin Toomey O’Azzello to Sasho, the burly owner smoking a cigar at the end of the ground floor bar passage way, packed up with intoxicated core circle patrons, tight except around his circumference.

“Hasn’t changed his cap or tune much in ten years,” Justin notes.

“I know him of course,” Sasho says without looking up, “with or without the ridiculous peasant cap. He’s been the same good man for over a decade. Dependable killer. Knocked the fuck around in Ayiti, that is for sure.”

“He’s dancing with Daria Andreavna, good for him! She’s got great big ones for him.”

“He’s always dancing with Daria,” replies Martina, “or at least trying to dance with her anyway.”

“You’re thinking of…” notes Justin.

“No my O’Azzello. I’m thinking exactly what I mean to be thinking. He’s always dancing with my Dasha right before things get interesting around here. And it sure will get interesting fast.”

“They just met boss,” says Martina.

Sasho almost yells,“You’re thinking of things three dimensionally and I am thinking of things fifth dimensionally, even sixthly or seventhly and I know that when those two dance. Fucking trouble. Niggers with fire and arms in the streets. Illubadori mind games. Decapitations on camera and lynchings to boot. Lynchings I say! Gays being flung of roof tops! And lots of piles of burning bodies. Walking dead and fucking flying robots. It’s time to call up all our troops, every single man to the front.”

Justin sometimes suspected the boss was fucking insane, but the old man had a gift for utilizing that insanity. The lights come on and the remaining guests not vouched for are herded like drunk cats out the secondary exit on to Ludlow street until no one is left inside but the staff, a handful of regulars and of course Sasho with his cigar.

Daria and Kawa wander out into what’s left of the night on the Lower East Side.

Out of the corner of his eye Sasho notices the mini Mexican weight staff are carrying the body of a man out of the tiny room upstairs where people go to fuck whores, or their drunk lady girlfriends, or college students. Or, he supposed less frequently, but evidently in case tonight; kill a man, drain his blood and empty his pockets. A little room to the very back of the second floor mezzanine. You can fuck or even murder at the top of your lungs and no one would know.  Of the four little Mexicans none are taller than four feet a piece and they must carry drag the body down the stairs. The corpse is pale from exsanguination, being bled totally dry.

“Into the soup or the soap?” asks little Enrique from Monterrey in Spanish.

Sasho nods. “Let the dead keep eating the dead, like they do out in the colonies.” James White and James Brown sit with their drinks in near silence. Tanya just counts money. Martina counts more money with a smoke in her mouth for some reason naked as they day she was born. Justin Toomey the General Manager sits on the bar next to Sasho wondering how many days the Tavern in its current incarnation has left above ground. 

0

THE WORLD TO COME. ACT I. SCENE 7.

SEVEN

At the Tea Room above the Tavern

“A BOMB PLOT”

The Bulgarian Tavern called ‘Mehanata’ on 113 Ludlow Street has roughly four doors in and three tunnels out. Also a roof hatch. You could completely miss the whole place if you weren’t looking for it. For the nine to thirteen million rats in their various stages of the great race to make it here, this city never fucking sleeps. Its go, go, go, go, zoom, zoom, rush rush! Slaves and Serfs to the trains for wage service. It’s all an illusion its fun here. With no currency, with endless wage work the place is bleak urban hell. It’s a filthy place except at the very center. The Isle of Man. Getting in early with red eyes and leaving late. Back on the cattle cars. The masters dangling enough to cover the rising rent and some groceries if you’re lucky. You’re so lucky to here in this cage! The hope dies out. You whore yourself somehow. You have to! You drink more than you should. It feels worse if you’re not from here. Even the yellow cab driver have more education than most of the rest of the country. The black sports utility vehicles, with tinted windows and important people that don’t want to look at you. The constant sirens. Everyone running somewhere not making eye contact. Always a fucking siren going off for some emergency that isn’t probably real. The city itself was built on the very top of the mountain. Its highest towers hold more rich and powerful people than anywhere on earth. Except maybe Moscow and London. This apple is all poison and rotten. The high octane hyper diversity is just a sex circus. Plus a racial death trap. Plus an ugly over crowed sprawl more regularly breaking then making those who arrive from the interior or abroad.

Nikholai Trickovitch is bleary eyed.  He stinks of cigarettes, some cheap men’s fragrance and also of raw smoked Rum. The climate here is repressive towards the end of summer. Rum Barbancourt Nine Star on the rocks isn’t served in this part of town. So he brought his own bottle to the tavern. For their troubles were about to mount exponentially. Their bravest battle was about to arrive. ‘Heroes will be separated from hooligans. The cowards from the brave. The sacred from the profane.’ Well anyway so said the voice of Emma Solomon on the Fire Switch Radio. 

Nikholai also technically, mostly by very early association with an even more militant Kawa in the early days of the Resistance is part of the inner most core of the leadership of the Z.O.B. The clandestine network of insurgent cells and for a time the editor of its underground newspaper, ‘the Banshee News Service.’ He highly prefers conducting his revolutionary duties from the computer of his uptown Penthouse. Moving things about the internet, correcting pamphlets and public movement speeches Kawa and their comrades give in soap box parks and on the trains. Nikh was persuaded to manage the logistics for the very First Haiti Operation.  He did pretty well. Only two had gotten killed. He was then later persuaded to manage ground logistics in Port-Au-Prince for the expeditionary forces. Still later, he joined the medical guerrillas in their ill-fated expedition into Colombia. Where most of the partisans were wiped out and he barely survived the long walk home. But, he has only so much will power to back up such walk and warfare.

‘I need yet another drink!’, thinks Trickovitch. He knows it will be a long meeting and the A/C won’t work well in the private upper club house. The night is really just getting started work wise even though it’s past 4am. They’re erring toward minimal street traffic, but even the rats and pigeons here work in shifts. Well that same night Nicholai Trickovitch put together a little squad to, “do another messy little big job.” There were big jobs and little jobs. There were protracted campaigns that took many years. Some jobs where social engineering was needed. Others where brute force was the best approach. A job that has a lot of force commitment is called ‘an Operation’. Several coordinated large scale operations are a ‘Campaign’.

This required some of both and right away. He had to get buy in. No one was ever really in charge. Now, outside New York the Resistance got very eclectic with who was involved. It would be inaccurate to say anyone could possibly ever lead it. It was bad in New York where well over 70% of the population wasn’t even born here. A lot of players. They all “Relied heavily on Neg, Blan and Gray magic to keep this whole thing together,” as Nicholai was fond of saying, “But in New York Fucking City, we still do things the old fashioned way. By having a real tight crew.”

For many, many years Newyorkgrad was not the old Newyorkgrad that so many who had never visited imagined it to be based on movies and television. In the dead of something, where night creeps toward dusk, around a table on the fourth floor of 113 Ludlow Street, they met. That is to say the restaurant immediately above the Mehanata Tavern. A little talk is underway, a briefing. Maybe also something of a sale pitch.

“There are thirteen elected leaders of the Z.O.B,” Trickovitch explains, “Two have disappeared. We don’t fill their seats, but we consider them probably, most likely dead. One is living in a submarine somewhere hidden. Two are sleeping. That’s a polite way of staying they were thrown in a camp and badly tortured. Most of them kill themselves sometime after. That means at any given period nine are left. Left in charge of all the cells in the division. Greater Newyorkgrad.”

The table is wooden and plates of tapas have all been cleared. Nobody got in from the street. They got in from the various tunnels. It’s time for tea.

“Let me tell you how this is gonna go down,” says Nikh to his fellow partisans which include the tall well-polished Jamaican Gangster Mickhi Dbrisk. He is wearing a black suit with no tie after coming from work at previous engagement. Where girls were still jiggling.

Mara Fitzduff is a half pint Fenian. Barely ever smiles. A dirty blonde rebel famous for her firebrand speeches on the Fire Switch Radio. Also present is Rafael Ernesto Contreras, the Peruvian disk jockey. A photographer too. Retired child soldier and lesser officer of a defunct guerrilla band in the Arequipa Province. The fifth member of this add-hock unit is Mr. Siegfried Sassoon. He speaks very well with great emotion in his face. He should be expected to as he is an actor classically trained in Moscow. He too is just getting off work as a bar tender at a flashy supper club up the street called the ‘Red Fox Box’. A dashing swaggerous man of Cuban descent. The sixth man in this last minute, late night call up was the light skinned Haitian smooth criminal Watson Entwissle. The seventh at the table wasn’t made yet. A smooth young blood from East New York. Says his name is Joshua Hunter. Has okay references and they are going to test him out. Could be a plant.

Watson is pretty pissed. You can tell when he’s pissed, he doesn’t pay attention at all. It’s based anyway on the past midnight hour. He left his favorite ‘sexy chocolate’ in bed in Yonkers for this “very tedious bullshit.” He doesn’t get to see his old lady enough. She lives in Boston. Ms. Charlotte from Uganda.

In the confusing and albeit vaguely disjointed chain of command Mara, Watson, Mickhi and Nicholai are all title holding inner leadership. Only one is from the inner nine. Siegfried Sassoon, Hunter and Raphael were called in as ‘hevals’. Though technically Hunter was not even a ‘provisional member’. Hasn’t made rank or been sworn in. Not written in the book of life. But they were told he can do good work by Dbrisk.

“The Labor Day weekend begins in 72 hours and you all know what’s coming,” explains Mickhi, “The West Indian Day Parade ain’t heading south at the Grand Army Plaza. Oh no, they’re gonna head north right over the bridges and attack the mostly empty City.”

Everybody except young Joshua Hunter knew that already. They were gonna stick Hunter with Watson and Watson would keep him working this weekend until he was trust-able, or dead. They were all aware of the score.

“As most of us know this revolt is a three stage attack in Newyorkgrad was being coordinated mostly by the Pan-Africanists, the Garveyites, the N.L.M.M., some of the liberal and radical medical trade unions, the I.W.W. of course, the Shi’a Muslims, the Occupiers, the affiliated radical student movements in C.U.N.Y., the 1199 Trade Union, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and of course, Uhuru and greater we,” explains Mickhi.

“The dry runs were the messy occupations on Wall Street and around the country last year to assess the state defenses. Phase Two is Labor Day where we take Breuklyn, the Bronx and Queens. Phase three will be to hold and liberate ‘the City’ just before New Year’s Eve,” he continues, “The goal is to declare confederated cantons up and down the east coast. Hunker down and defend them from federal counter assault.” 

“Hectic shit,” mutters Raphael.

“Our role then is quite basic in phase two,” explains Nikholai Trickovitch, who knew indeed that the General Rising was close in coming, but not actually a mere five days away.

“We all know what was revealed about the h1n1 and Ebola. We’ve all seen the reports. The documentation has been widely circulated and now our people are ready. Enough outrages have occurred to spark something bigger than riots. The ‘Stop and Frisk’, the weekly shootings, the Iran war conscription and the new walking drones of course. This time almost everyone expects death camps and prolonged urban warfare, not Capoeira,” Mickhi explains.

“The Z.O.B. has called up eight hundred riflemen, combat medics and agitation propaganda officers to support the needs of the parade. Our convoy of marauders. They will be attached to each major island band truck. Flying columns are on the ready in all five boroughs. An additional three hundred and forty three women and men.

“Listen!”, declared Watson, “Watson knows all of this shit. So brother please come to conclusion so I can get Bronx bound with this new jack,” says Watson, “he can wash my care before we die in the coming melee.”

“Watson, we just need this young blood briefed. You can get out the door in fifty minutes,” Mickhi tells him. Used to his load way.

“Watson needs this to happen in less minutes,” he replies with a grin.

“As usual,” continues Mickhi, “The two Haitian Convoys will bring up the middle and the rear. Unknown to the City parade organizers, and hopefully the police intelligence forces, there are actually three Haitian bands this year of 10,000 masqueraders a piece. About ¾ up the route the Middle Convoy which is gonna be twice as big will initiate the raid across the Grand Army Plaza and then fight their way up Flatbush hope fully with the people behind us. And this is when the hectic bloody melee will begin.”

“What’s our precise role tonight,” asks Siegfried Sassoon. Siggy, never goes to that many meetings. He never votes in Otriad elections except with his feet for Kawa. When Kawa is leading he steps back and when Kawa is sleeping her steps up. He did however vote for keeping Kawa asleep after the last Haiti job, when the Hospitaliers took him very hard. Kawa is a serious knock around guy; best estimates think he’s been taken to the camps over 21 times. About three years’ worth of his life. Siggy, like Watson does jobs not meetings. Neither ever-ever tries to be at these meetings. Rarely even the candle light salons in Breuklyn. Which are sometimes cute.

“We’re gonna install Fire Station Transmitters on four very, very tall structures,” says Mara Fitzduff. She has over the years been the club’s ‘Chief of Staff’, worked in the  propaganda bureau, in academy on the ‘Science of Women’ and done much of the fund raising for the past ten years. She’s not always officially even in the Z.O.B., but she is always very dependable. She has no salty broag. She’s got one kid with a soldier who ran off somewhere. And another with the Russian-Ivory loan shark Donny Gold who Kawa and Nikholai went to high school with ‘way back in the day’. So in that regard she’s double tied down.

“And then tomorrow we’re gonna blow up the Consolidated Edison building, putting most of Manhattan in the dark” says Mickhi Dbrisk, who has been the club’s Operation’s Chief since nearly the very beginning. He was in prison for a year as a teenager. When the cops accused him and four friends of all robbing a liquor store and no one talked. Some people say he’s a Crip, but he’s allegedly not a Crip anymore.

Nikholai holds the official position of Logistics Coordinator, but he’s more hands on than many before or after him as a good logistic fixer should be. He’s the one who arranges a lot of the raids and bombing targets. Now that Kawa lives in a dream, or a nightmare.

“The transmitters will override the police radio system and turn whatever frequencies we feel like into dancehall radio stations. We need them hidden and we need them high,” explains Mara, “so we can keep broadcasting when they shut the internet down again.”

“We’ve gotten the four choice spots picked out well enough,” Nicholai explains, “each transmitter is about the size of a football. There are blasters and flicker masks in the bags at the downstairs at coat check. But those are for getting out of the buildings later. Soon as this meeting is done, if you agree to this shit, you’re all getting in the town cars outside and getting dropped near bye all four targets. Fuck the girls if you feel like, if that works for you. We want you rested and loose. The town cars bring you to apartment brothels we work with and you sleep there. Whatever you decide to do,” Mara says.

She continues, “You wake up again when it’s dark. One person one location. In the bags with the guns and flicker masks are the addresses and names of four sympathetic venues, but really the car will just take you pretty near there. You’re going to get dropped at some of the tallest buildings on the island. Masks go on to obscure your faces, before you get out of the town cars. The girls will have you over for a drink, and whatever. Don’t really drink. Fuck if you wanna fuck and go to sleep. Then they will give you roof access when you get up. Those masks don’t come off in elevators, in lobbies, on streets anywhere near that building. The cameras are everywhere, as you know. You will get up the roof and turn on the transmitters.

“Try to hide them somewhere,” Nicholai mentions. Don’t just leave them lying around, they’re booby trapped anyway. Whoever tries to turn them off will is gonna lose their arms and face,” says Mara.

“Watson, you are assigned to the Heights. You’ll take Hunter with you. Siggy you’re in Midtown. Jon Denby and I will work in lower Manhattan. Raphael you’ll be setting up the Long Island City installation which is quite tricky because there’s nothing residential in the CITI Corp building so we’ll have to social engineer it. Nicholai and Dbrisk will go after the High tower on Atlantic Junction also with the same predicament.”

“And by assigned, we’re asking you to accept the job as a volunteer,” Mickhi explains.

“For the good of the service,” Mara says with a smile.

“How is Jon Denby doing?” Mickhi asks.

“His father is real sick again, it cuts into his out time,” Nicholai explained.

“So are you with this? You’re all Pararescuemen and or amateur Parapsychologists so I’m sure this will all just be fun. Once you get to the safe houses you’re staying at feel free to relax and take a long nap. You’ve all been up all week. Some of you all month. This doesn’t have to happen at once or tomorrow, it just has to happen before we blow up the power station on Monday morning. So enjoy, thank god it’s Tuesday. Some of these sympathizers are very attractive. I’m not saying any of you would take a whole a day to ravish the high end escorts at the brothels you’ll be staying at. Certainly not as either husbands, fathers, or Haitian gentlemen. But well it’s an option. Can’t have you stressed,” grins Mara knowing full well Raphael is married albeit a consummate adulterer. That Mickhi Dbrisk for all intents and purposes has three or four wives. That Siggy is secretly married to the daughter of a powerful Russian oligarch. That Nicholai is an incorrigible whore monger. And that Watson Entwissle is a very loyal family man. A true Haitian gentleman.

“We’re working out of the apartment brothels yet again?” asks Raphael. The joy in his voice is real for he so loves the Manhattan apartment brothels. You can’t afford them as an internationalist Disk Jockey.

“We need these devices set up real high,” says Mara, “If we can knock out their power and maintain alternative systems of communications we’re keeping to our end of the mutual aid agreement with Uhuru. Without blowing our arsenal and fighters prematurely,” she says, “as you all know this is phase two of three. We’re only fully mobilizing if they manage to take the City or if they hold Breuklyn longer than a week. Otherwise it’s 1st Nivôse.”

“I know I’m in,” asks Raphael.

“Shut the fuck up, Watson knows before he came here he was in.”

“Ha Chi will be a little pissed,” says Siggy, “But of course. It’s too late to get out now.”

“Joshua, you gonna ride with us on this?” Watson asks him.

“Yeah one hundred,” the kid replies.

Mickhi Dbrisk chuckles.    

“Four transmitters. Then we blow the Consolidated Edison N.S.A. Data aggregation depot on Monday morning and EMP the district financial at noon thirty Monday with the anarchists, if they breech. Monday. All of you are in the trenches and I’m running dispatch with Anya out of a most secure location. Things are going to pop the hell off prematurely. We’ll do the best we can to keep up with impossible expectations, any questions?”

No one has any.

“I love centralized democracy. All of you please grab your gear at coat check and get in the cars outside via the alley door,” Mara tells them, “Good luck. Don’t get needlessly killed. Shahid Namaran!”

Things were about to go smash bang! Then fully explode. In flame and death in the night. To the sweet blaring tunes of the Wild West Indies.

0

A Great Crime

A Great Crime

What if a crime of enormous magnitude was being carried out in the most sanctimonious and white washed paradigm imaginable?

Perhaps in the name of social justice, gender equity, human rights and democracy. A great and unnatural pillage of humanity and planetary resources being carried out as a civilizing, modernizing mission. Preceding at such an alarming rate that 5 in 7 humans were as of 2015ce reduced to varying degrees of miserable serfdom and the climate itself was being altered, rendering the ecosystem hostile to life. What if an international web of small clustered elites were via their accumulation of wealth concentrated in several developed nations. And these elites we able to not only shape the dominant socio-political discourse; they were able to carry out their expropriation by calling it “development.”

The Development Enterprise as we understand it began after the Second World War with the 1948 implementation of the Marshal Plan. The intention of this far-reaching US Aid investment was to keep war-ravaged Western Europe from being absorbed into the Soviet sphere. Development subsequently evolved into a far more expansive international architecture. Its newly stated intention within the Cold War context was to modernize & industrialize the former colonial, third world and later the Post-Soviet nations. Packages of civilian and military aid were coupled with technical assistance. Non-governmental organizations proliferated generally around poverty alleviation and cause specific programs. The United Nations ratified a wide range of human rights instruments as rapidly escalating armed conflicts accelerated in almost every nation in the developing world. By 2014, there have been 15 confirmed acts of Genocide by International Law since 1945, 37 total if you include acts of democide (Rummel, 1998). Environmental degradation has resulted in expanding disastrous climate change (Nordhaus, 2013).

There are over three billion human beings living at or below $2.50 a family a day that are worth as much in their collective assets as the top 83 richest people on earth (Oxfam, 2014). It is believed that over 29.8 million people still live in chattel slavery (Global Slavery Index, 2013). That number might expand tenfold were we to incorporate low paid, race to the bottom type assembly plants and bonded labor. While the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals have supposedly ‘halved global extreme poverty’, ‘doubled human access to clean water’ and ‘halted new infection with HIV-AIDS’ divested of all the many political, economic and religious superstructures the results of the development enterprise are highly underwhelming. Largely unmeasured, unaccountable and top down in implementation; if not an outright architecture to maintain former colonial relationships between states referred to as dependencies (Rist, 2002); development lacks to a growing body of humanity whatever moral imperative it once enjoyed.

Development today is a highly subjective and amorphous field that lacks measurement or even an agreed to verifiable definition (Rist, 2007). Within the ranks of this vast and ambitious undertaking are bright eyed idealists; ego maniacs; missionaries, spies; colonialists, national patriots and aspiring revolutionaries. Economic opportunists are everywhere. As well as wolves in sheep’s clothing who in pursuit of bare national & self-interest leave not a scrap for the future. This global enterprise of unprecedented scale relies upon various competing theories of change and remedy, constantly in antagonism. That the needs of the present generation do not outstrip the prosperity or availability of future generation’s needs; juxtaposed to a Kuznets curve positing that rising inequality precedes equity. Concentration on Sen’s maximization of agency & capability; or breaking physical and mental dependency via Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. Does one glorify the United Nations and multilateral big-push theory and Sachs’ Millennium Villages or endorse Easterly’s social entrepreneurial searchers and the Monterrey Consensus. Does the future look to John Smith via ‘Free Market Fundamentalism’ or to the ghost of Karl Marx? Human Rights or human needs; the ‘ease of doing business’ or the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Capacity or capability? Do developing nations borrow from the World Bank or BRICS; is the worldview of the practitioners shaped by World Economic Forum or World Social Forum. Where do we ultimately place priority and resource mobilization; within the social, the economic or environmental sphere? Does work actually set people free? No one knows, or can know, the answer to any of those questions. Largely due to a total lack of objective and transparent data. 

We must refuse to accept the validity of government statistics being produced by governments that cannot meet the most basic social services such as feeding, housing and providing healthcare and education for their people. We must also reject systems of Monitoring & Evaluating any data that are carried out by the same institutions that the data reflects performance upon. The World Bank in 2001 conducted a massive participatory study of poverty where tens of thousands of people living below $1.25 a day were asked what could be done. When the UNDP in 2014 asked similar questions to over 1 million people about the ‘world they wanted’ it was still obvious; the interests of the powerful few, the narrow interests of the oligarchic elites persist in smothering the voices of the poor, silencing all calls for change and imposing upon us all the vision of acceptable development, modernization and social progress (Piketty, 2014).

Underlying all this chaos and urgency is the objective reality that over 4 billion human beings are living in varying degrees of wretched deprivation, dying miserably before their time (World Bank Data/UNDP 2015). There is a very harmful dual untruth being perpetuated by majoritarian development actors in the United States and Europe. It is based on a dual illusion that has been furthered by big media apparatuses and financed by the corporate, business & banking sectors which also fund the various political parties in high office with direct bribes, indirect bribes and campaign financing.

Later we will introduce a cruel and insidious “Dual Illusion”; part and parcel is the dual un-truth contained implicitly.

The first part of this great un-truth is that human progress is a proven fact upon the ground; that the world is gradually getting freer, safer and more equitable; exemplified by indicators such as trade statistics, GDP and the Millennium Development Goals. This is the world view offered by TED Talks pundits, the neo-liberal theories of economist Jeffrey Sachs and revisionist academics such exemplified Steven Pinker. That poverty is ending and violence is ever decreasing.

The second part of the untruth is that capitalism and globalization are the drivers of this equitable progress and that market forces are ultimately good for the poor. The so-called ‘hard data’ that we have on hand does not well substantiate either highly muddy illusion. Both of which are paradigm hallmarks of a North Western development consensus which has for too long been operating unaccountable to all those it claims to serve, while attempting to maintain a monopoly on development and its discourse. We cannot reasonably prove in a scientific and objective way that Walt Rostow’s “Modernization Theory” is actually even occurring. We cannot prove that global violence, war and conflict is markedly decreased from unestablished, and largely un-kept statistical base lines from all the ages before 1848 (most of world history); and most importantly; we are being intellectually coerced (and coddled) by Western academics, politicians and economists to embrace a growth-obsessed, econometric free market fundamentalism simply on the basis of the competing ideologies battle field defeat.

The famines, gulags, atrocities and repressions used to chronicle the civil warfare transitions from backwards feudal and peasant societies to 20th century socialist incarnations are direct exacerbations of top down socio-economic transformations in a state of perpetual cold and hot proxy war with the Western capitalist system. Russia and China have without a doubt gone in the course of less than one hundred years from being defeated, long victimized semi-feudal peripheral powers to super power hegemons and serious core contenders (Wallerstein, 2004)(Amin, 2006).

There can be no clear and absolute measurement of the data being generated to verify progress in the Human condition despite what various experts attempt to claim. The numbers on hand at the United Nations and World Bank are supplied by statistical ministries in a variety of highly non-transparent [if not overtly corrupt and incompetent] national governments aggregated to produce results that do not tell full or even partial truths. Despite what is being claimed at global conferences; we do not actually have much valid comparative data on the human condition before 1848 (Foucault, 1988). At the 2013 Interaction Forum, the broadest confederation of American development NGOs and Humanitarian actors, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres admitted, “We are not entirely prepared”. More conflicts, deeply entrenched poverty, coupled with the targeting of aid workers will occur alongside decreases in funds and the impacts of global climate change. Yet, across the western development enterprise, almost all of the Western and white-washed academia and technocracy seem to agree that the very worst of human civilization is behind us (Pinker, 2013). Climate change and gender equity are to subsume talk of structural human rights achievement and class warfare as the acceptable development discourse.  

There still is massive disagreement regarding the hierarchy of immediate needs for those 5 billion human souls that live on less than USD 10 a day; 4 billion at below $4 per family per day. 3 billion of which live on less than USD 2.50 a day; and 1.2 billion on less than USD 1.25 the number of which living in Sub-Saharan Africa which may in fact have in the last decade doubled (World Bank, 2015). The economist Thomas Piketty argues in his 2014 book Capital in the 21st Century that not only has there never been such wealth & income inequality ever in recorded history; but that at present rates oligarchic wealth accumulations are increasing and ultimately highly destabilizing to both markets and democracy.

The question remains one of enlisting actual participation and empowerment, not governance. Will listening to the ‘voices of the poor’ be a meaningless slogan or a set of specific instructions to those invested in actually achieving equality? Will development amount to economic enrichment of existing elites, corrupt governments and be the political aid carrot to the military stick; or will development mean emancipation from poverty and a tool kit to achieve freedom from long running structural violence (Goulet, 1971).

Development economist Amyarta Sen believes that development is a means to achieve freedom and freedom is achieved by enabling human capability. Jeffery Sachs believes poverty can be eliminated though coordinated action via a big push style global Marshal Plan. Banerjee & Duflo argue that not until randomized control trials drive interventions are we truly transparent and accountable. Many denounce development itself as a neo-colonialist scheme (Amir, 1973) and regardless of your political tendency one must admit the same actors of the North West dominate. OECD countries are theoretically bound to be giving 0.7% of GDP in direct foreign aid, to be matched by 0.3% via private sector charitable giving. However all rich, high HDI nations seem to prefer the 2002 Monterrey Consensus; to invest in trade related infrastructure. A regular buzzword in the enterprise is ‘Capacity building’, but this is often limited to technocracy and management training going directly to the government/public sector. Throughout the development and humanitarian sector coordination is irregular, local participation is largely dictated top down, and dependency is fostered beholden to national political directives, or just simple failure to meaningfully empower the so-called beneficiaries.

Development cannot easily be grouped by proponent origin geography, but a grouping of tendencies in methodology can be identified from their sources. It is important to remember that Development is not purely about donor and beneficiary nations; there is a clear linkage between internal national developments of a governments own population and external projection of its development paradigm. Development fosters dependency inherently; citizens dependent on government services and developing nations dependent on developed ones; their economies wide open their resources and cheap labor reserves ripe for picking.  

There has emerged in the developing world a variety of effective means to break that dependency and unleash the human capability Amyarta Sen was referring to. Southern Development (Bangladesh, India, Cuba and Tanzania) is often categorized by utilization of micro-finance as credit base for social programs, encouraging self-reliance, directing investment internally and promoting massive capacity investment via vocational training in vital services. In the experience of Eastern Development (emanating from Russia, China, Israel and Iran); development focuses on construction of fixed infrastructure, long term investment in education & health, large scale/ long term cultivation of local leadership capacity and highly replicable localized mass training.

As opposed to Northern Development (Advanced Welfare States) largely concerned and successful with their own citizens development; and Western Development (emanating from the European Union and the United States via the OECD) that focuses predominantly on excess asset dumping, promoting market deregulation and free trade policy, augmenting perceived comparative advantage, supporting widespread privatization; and in the era of Gates philanthropy pushing disease surveillance, availability of inexpensive pharmaceuticals, women’s literacy [and inclusion in the work force] as well as advancing shallow policy changes in socio-political culture and asserting entrepreneurship when and where ever it can be advanced.

Within local Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), Social Movement Organizations (SMOs), trade unions, religious intuitions and Community Based Organizations (CBOs) of the so-called Global South, but in actuality economic dependent periphery; maximized human resources are often the primary asset they have to work with. Cut off from mega donors, domestically or abroad and often from services typically provided by government; innovation has been the key to community survival, which has superseded international external development strategies rarely aligned with political realities. A result of that innovation is the understanding that development is best implemented through indigenous knowledge, through local control of the means of development; and through investments in skills and training called Mass Capacity Development (MCD).

Our movement is being driven by development programs initiated in the Global South/Periphery, but the theoretical construct is Eastern in origin (Rist, 2011). The world is divided into 216 economic, quasi-national zones. While it would be largely accurate to state that the core of the world system lies in the global North and West; it would be wildly inaccurate to think this is a static reality. There are multipolar challenges coming from the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation and India. There are a myriad of shifting paradigms in development methodology.

Particularly those activities occurring in Cuba, Bangladesh, but also in New York, India, Israel and Iran. While this may seem a highly irregular data set the following findings are emerging that will revolutionize the system of Development Capacity Building. To transform the enterprise completely from one, which focuses on barely meeting human needs to one that generates human rights achievement via mass capacity.

From Cuba we have seen some of the largest medical deployments in human history; an estimated 50,000 medical workers and comparable number of teachers and construction workers (Feinsilver, 1993). A full 40-60% of Cuba’s GDP is generated providing healthcare, education and construction of infrastructure to the developing world. Its population is 99% literate and has better health indicators than the United States.

Bangladesh has facilitated the birth of the world’s largest NGO BRAC. Over 102,281 people (BRAC, 2012) employed in a massive hybrid system that cover 70-80% of its own operational needs though social industries. That runs major businesses, micro creditors, schools, health services and paraprofessional training.

The Acumen Fund in New York has set up over 82 major social enterprises in the global south through their implementation of patient capital.  

Israel has developed sophisticated training systems in health and agriculture to generate functional cohorts. Its state formation itself was a demonstration of parallel state development. Introducing from abroad the piecemeal part of an unrecognized or supported state.

Iran has made incredible progress through an innovative system of community health workers called the Behvarzan; it has also demonstrated via Hezbollah in Lebanon its ability to rapidly introduce Para State functionality and security in a war zone.

Beginning in 2008 India via the Indian Skills Development Corporation has set out to provide vocational training to millions of it is citizens via a vast public-private partnership.

The true “economic miracles” of the last twenty years were not those countries which followed the advice of Washington Consensus; they were not the captive Asian Tigers; they were China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Ethiopia who generally ignored the basic elements of the Washington Consensus completely (Rodrik, 2002).

There should be no mistake that development is highly complex, perhaps the most ambitious undertaking of human civilization; an organized and sustained campaign to alleviate massive human suffering and injustice. However, whether we in the North West wish to admit it or not; most of the leading causes of underdevelopment were & are the direct result of social, military and economic polies initiated by developed nation governments (Blum, 2003).

We must operate in the realm of realpolitik, but we must also draw definitive lines between what is in the interests of the long suffering masses of humanity verses what is done in our own so-called national interests, to secure the lifestyles and wants of the developed world at the expense of the majority of the species. Mass Capacity Development is not adversarial. It does not pit nation against nation or posit a new utopian political order. Instead, modular vocational development is the great leveler that allows all who are willing to engage in productive social enterprises to have doors open to their advancement. It places development back in the hands of the community while engaging the recommendation that development and aid are best directed not at state systems but towards striving masses yearning to acquire a means to fish. Dependency is not broken with a ‘leaky begging bowl’ but with the skills and training to invest in ones future (Escobar, 1995).

The Development Enterprise has regularly circumvented the local populations of the developing world by focusing aid into the opportunistic private sector, often corrupt public sector or via foreign dominated and culturally hostile NGOs. Development too often ignores the capacity of local people and focuses on the capacity of increasingly failing states (Collier, 2007).

Throughout the history of development since 1948 the politics, economic needs and priorities of the North West have not only shaped the way we are taught to view human progress, but also tethered more than half the human race to the most wretched and deplorable living conditions imaginable.

The concept of multi-disciplinary vocational/ technical paraprofessional training coupled with the formation of civil service enterprises (CSE) is seemingly anathema to North-Western development, but remains at the fore front of South-Eastern/ South-South development exemplified by Russia, Cuba, Israel, Iran, Bangladesh and the People’s Republic of China. Responsible elements within the global development enterprise must become not only “accountable to those they serve” but work actively to break all forms of foreign dependency; especially in this a new era of unstable Multipolarity.

The future of development must assume a marked departure from the imperatives of the former colonial powers as well as those emerging hegemons that are effecting core shift from ‘West to Rest’ via the BRICS. The gross human rights violations and structural injustices that have been perpetrated via the world system have resulted in 3.5 billion humans living below $3 per day, 45 active low, medium and high intensity armed conflicts (Kaldor, 1999) (Uppsala, 2015), vast deterioration of our climate via CO2 emission and unprecedented wealth concentrating the worth of half the human race in the hands of just 83 individuals (Oxfam, 2015). The perversity of this reality bears it being repeated.

This thesis via its interpretation of several eastern theoretical frameworks; organizational case studies and direct RCT field implementation of the suggested approach recommends that the blue print to emancipatory development via human rights and justice lies no longer in hands of the North-Western powers that have for 500 years demonstrated both their tendencies toward proliferation of both conflict and exploitation (Wallerstein, 1974). Nor does it fall evenly into the three sectors (private, public and NGO) that so far have failed to meaningfully deliver development to more than half of the species.

The micro-problem is the wholesale refusal to admit ‘development as a political act’, the inverse of interstate warfare. A system of theory, technology and praxis carried out upon a targeted population group. The macro-problem is that those that designed the architecture of the development enterprise had no intention of relinquishing their power differentials or their own hyper-development.

This manuscript will build upon these Eastern and Southern case studies and demonstrated praxis to outline a bold new methodology of development called Mass Capacity Approach (MCA). I will then illustrate the applicability of this modal for proliferation in all four sectors of the enterprise. It will draw on historic as well as contemporary examples to demonstrate the validity of development efforts to achieve equitable societies and human rights security through Parallel State Theory (PST); the demonstrated development paradigm that allows communities to fully control the terms, planning and implementation of their own development.    

The solution to this series of overlapping, multi-dimensional problems which have yielded the contemporary tapestry of mass human rights violation is a massive investment in fourth sector human capacity via the trades and professions most needed to alleviate this highly systemic injustice. To wean humans off unnecessary dependency; political subservience to local elites often directly linked to the economic domination by foreigners.

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FIRE SWITCH

On Emancipatory Development

A Democratic Confederalist Manifesto

על התפתחות משחררת       حول التنمية التحررية

О развитии эмансипации

Grey Book 8th Edition

Partisan’s Oath

We all have a duty to act.

In our hearts,

We know that people should not live as they do.

Humanity was born free and equal,

Yet, across this earth lies broken, dying hungry and in chains.

It is our duty to act that unites us.

To act in association for these promised rights.

Medicine, Education, and Emancipatory Development;

Are our primary tools against injustice.

We promise to wield these tools on the front lines of suffering

We will build the world we wish to see.

Seed by Seed.

Brick by Brick.

We carry the torches of the change makers who fell before us.

Fighting boldly for an idea.

That we were born free woman and men.

That we will never surrender.

That we will never accept anything short of full freedom.

Our numbers are man and each day multiply.

In the face of mounting injustices.

For while fighting isolated and in darkness,

We have become resourceful.

As realization spreads that this is not how we must live.

We stand ready to defend

The Impoverished.

The Wretched.

The Victimized.

The Enslaved.

We are prepared to struggle as long as we must.

Generation by Generation.

Until every last man, woman and child is also free.

In unity there is great strength.

Because I love my brothers and my sisters,

My mother and my father,

My children, my friends, my comrades

And also the suffering stranger

This is why I have joined the Association

And it’s Partisans,

Placed myself on the side of humanity,

And enlisted in the Resistance.

Now that my eyes are open,

I will leave no person behind the lines of war and poverty.

Rights trampled by governments.

I will live my life as friend of the people.

I will never look away from the truth.

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‘THE WORLD TO COME’ ACT I. SCENE 5.

FIVE

 In Bila Tserkva, Ukraine

“AN AUSPICIOUS VIRGIN BIRTH”

Little blonde and gigging, wide eyed Yelizaveta Aleksandrovna Perechenova was born at the end of the U.S.S.R in the Ukrainian City of Bila Tserkva Oblast on Messidor 2nd,1987. The rest is all misinformation. Gypsy legends and mere ignorant speculation. The seemingly miraculous particulars surrounding her allegedly virgin birth were many fold and are to this day recounted. Her mother Tanya Ivanova seemed to have reversed in age by ten years over the course of the pregnancy. When she finally gave birth to her first child she bore the resemblance to a girl in her late teens. Not a woman approaching nearly thirty four. Sasho’s closest men patted him on the shoulder and told him, ‘very, very well played.’ But honestly, at that stage he not not even gotten his dick wet.

The second highly strange miracle occurred shortly after little infant Yelizaveta’s birth. All the animals in all of the forests surrounding Bila Tserkva Oblast began to show up at the city hospital. So congested with various fauna wandering about the city that a whole task force of Red Army men from Kiev were needed to attempt removal of this glut of birds and bears and deer as well as animals that the authorities in the Ministry of Social Ecology had long thought were rendered extinct. These animals seemed drawn to the hospital and for a whole lunar month after little Yelizaveta’s birth they were drawn to family dacha of the Perchevney family to the south a day’s journey from the city.

   The third strange miracle was that infant Yelizaveta was not only able to speak Russian within the third month of her infancy, but by her third year English, Spanish, Old Ivory and a bizarre dialect of French called Ayitian Creole spoken exclusively on the Caribbean island ‘Republic of Palmares’. So marvelous was this behavior an infant which spoke multiple complex foreign  languages that Alexander and Tania Ivanova agreed to conceal this from the world and hide the girl on a dascha as long as possible so no knowledge of this genius might alert the proper authorities to auspicious comings and goings which might result in the borrowing of their prodigious infant. Although the phenomenon of animals and birds flooding the forests and airspace of the dascha made a clandestine upbringing quite hard to arrange.

        The fourth miracle occurred at Yelizaveta’s fourth birthday when she turned to her mother and said that as long as the family stayed happily in Bila Tserkva, no one in that city would ever die. So it was for a time of around two years.

           In 1989 the Soviet Union began to completely unravel. The despotic red dream crumbled country by country and the quality of living markedly dropped off.  Life as they understood it in relation to the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ came to an end. There was not one instance of a reported death in an hundred mile radius of Bila Tserkva though for the two years leading up the fall of the Berlin Wall. During this time Alexander was away from the family for extended periods of time. As the only Ivory left in Bila Tserkva his admittance to the inner Party was highly unorthodox. Also, his admittance to Medical College and his marriage to Tanya Ivanova who came from a prosperous Ruus family of Slavic Russian intellectuals close to the local seats of Communist power in Kiev. To court, win and impregnate Tanya had been a complicated and also costly venture. Men lined up longer than the ration lines of the 19080’s for the chance to date the daughter of this local Party boss. Alexander was not only a half Ivory by paperwork but from a family that had devolved slowly from yeshiva benchers to raw smuggler high way people and then back into lazy migrant Rabbis.

          By forging a passport and bribing several dozen people Alexander was able to change his ethnic designation from “Ivory” to “Bulgarian” and then later with more bribes to “Russian”.  And thus was able to arrive in Kiev at age 18 to begin his medical training. It was there in university that he encountered the affluent and ravishing daughter of a party boss. Ms. Tanya Ivanova who was studying engineering in the same college.

          After a lengthy and tumultuous courtship he gave her a tiny watch encased in a gold heart. He said that if she ran away with him to the Sakhalin Soviet upon completion of their studies, an island to Russia’s far east past Siberia, north of Japan then they would one day escape to Illubador and eventually to America as soon as the Cold War ended in seemingly inevitable capitalist victory. This was the end of the eighties and the writing was written clearly on the Berlin wall. One night she secretly packed her bags and joined him in a waiting car and they finally eloped in 1984.

      He told her that by the time the watch stopped running they would be in America and by the time it started up again they’d never want for anything again. They barely made it as far as the city limits. Goons in black caps in the employ of her father Ivan Ivanovitch’s stopped them at a check point. They beat Alexander rather badly. They returned a crying distraught Tanya to her father and threw the covert Ivoryish doctor Alexander Perchevney into a jail for special prisoners who committed crimes that were handled in the cold and quiet.

The night of this attempted elopement and calamity the father of Tanya, Ivan Ivanovitch had a terrible dream.  He dreamed an army of many of thousands of four-foot Mexicans were parachuting out of the sky and attacking Bila Tserkva in an effort to rescue the young Alexander. He dreamed of the strange days of nightmare and plague about to wreak havoc on all of Kiev and the whole Soviet Socialist world if necessary should the detention of his daughters lover go on. In the dream his daughter Tanya fell into some inexplicable coma and for each day of Alexander’s captivity ten men disappeared without a trace. Then twenty men. And so on. Until by the end of the dream month of Alexander’s imprisonment, there were virtually no Russian or Ukrainian men left alive in Kiev. The strange wave of disappearances swept through the local Party apparatus and military and leaders of state owned business cooperatives and even the secret police and soon like a strange and miraculous and ghostly purge had been carried out. Finally, finally Alexander was not just the only secret Ivory in Kiev, but conspicuously the only person left alive with a passport that said “Russian”. Finally, after the third lunar dream month, it began to snow. To snow with such determination that obstruction and paralysis took hold. Throughout the eerie disappearances, the drop in temperature, the sky falling out, Ivan Ivanovitch’s daughter Tanya hovered in a mesmerized trance. Alexander languished in prison although there was no one left to guard him besides Ivan though he did not even three months into the nightmare connect his interference with the love of his daughter for this Ivoryish medical student to anything so, other worldly. Yes, people did disappear from time to time, but not often the entire Inner Party Cadre of a major Soviet capital city. Yes it did snow but not with the endless and unceasing siege of white deluge they were experiencing, or in month of Prairial!

Finally, in the dream the sun itself ceased to rise. And without party leaders, bureaucrats, draped in over forty feet of snow, Kiev underwent forty days of night. During this time Ivan never left the dream police garrison where he and Alexander Perchevney would bond intermittently over Chess, Go and Vodka. Bonding begrudgingly, for Ivan spoke no Ukrainian and by the fourth month of these phenomena no one was willing to speak any Russian anymore under the superstitious belief that it would bring death. So Alexander the Ivory and Ivan, party boss of Bila Tserkva spoke for the first time. First, on the subject of haShem, then on the subject of the devil. And then also a bit on women which both agreed were stronger in will than either HaShem’s or the craft works of some lesser spooky devils.

“You love my daughter, but what do I care, fundamentally speaking? Love, is after all, just bullshit and chemicals. You offer her and as importantly me nothing, really, at all,” Ivan informed young Alexander.

      “As I have never loved or even thought to love another woman so do I love your Tanya!”

      “You will never be accepted here or anywhere as a damn Ivory! Even a party Ivory is suspect. Even with a new name and a medical certificate. Your Ivoryish horns and tail cannot hide.”

     “You could sponsor me. You can sponsor me to the Inner Party and allow me to marry her.”

  “I’m not frightened by the evil weird  Ivory magic outside. I know these are only cruel vodka lullabies, whispers in the ear of a man made hard and hateful by life. I will awake in my bed tomorrow! There will be no Mexican invaders, no disappearing apparatchiks, no endless snow or black endless night. You will be sent to deep Siberia for some infraction. Tanya will wake up and marry a Russian Calvary officer. Or someone from the foreign bureau.”

   “How can you be sure?” asked Alexander Perchevney, “How can you know if your dreams are real or if some dark power has unleashed itself against your house for obstructing our basic and sincere love?”

“Because there is no love or magic allowed here. Those are of course bourgeoisie inventions. I will wake up soon, I feel it. And then order you shot.”

For nearly two fortnights General Winter took full hold of Bila Tserkva. It did not stop snowing. It did not become day again. By third fortnight of his imprisonment and Tanya’s mysterious coma there were no Russian anything left in the darkness. Ivan in his solitude became like a prisoner too. The heavy snows then cut Bila Tserkva off from all of the rest of the Soviet world and the wake field Ivan hoped would come; nearly a year later still had not transpired, nor had he ever slept.  

“You damn cursed Ivory! What kind of dark magic have you unleashed?”

      “This is not my doing,” muttered Alexander defensively.

             “When will I wake from this perverse nightmare of ‘upsidedownhood’, of idiotic dragfootery?! You cannot ever marry my daughter. You are not a whole man. You will never give my daughter a good secure life.”

             “This is not my doing! Not by any means! You’ve brought this nightmare upon yourself. I have no powers like these.”  

“A typical Ivoryish response.”

Lost and asleep an endless nightmare Ivan Ivanovitch turned to mankind’s oldest imaginary friend. He implored the Russian Orthodox HaShem to end this plague of darkness, deprivation and Ivoryish parasitic blight!

But as we all know, if there is a haShem, it is a long game if not vaguely soviet haShem, a go without understandable morals or temporal reward for the seemingly righteous. Whatever lesson it wishes us to learn is like algebra to an ant farm. It has been lost on us completely in it magnitude and scale.

The sun never rose and Ivan Ivanovitch never yielded. At the beginning of the spring of his imprisonment there dropped from the sky blue and red parachutists of four foot stature, one a day. Grinning bandoliered Latin American Pararescuemen each gliding down into the outskirts of town and taking up position in the woods. One a day. With all the Russians gone, the Ukrainians began hiring these men as day laborers and yard workers. Ivan Ivanovitch began to suspect that there was a growing secret army of these Latino Pararescuemen waiting in the shadows awaiting the right moment to break young Alexander out of prison and spirit him into the wilderness of North America.

While Alexander ‘Sasho’ Perchevney sat long miserable ten years in confinement punished for his love and his allegedly race. The young aspiring dentist, future founder of the fearsome Bratva that would bear his family name and that would so loot the banks of the world. He sat in his own thoughts and laid a most elaborate plan. Awaiting rescue and reunion with his beloved Tanya. A most auspicious woman to be sure.  While languishing in solitary confinement he dreamed up a way to steal the very most secret secrets of the ancient tribe called Ivory. Thus when and if, a big if, ‘the world to come’, eventually came, it would be a world completely under his control. Subservient to his whims and ambitions.

“Once someone or something has successfully attacked you. Has violated your family, fucked up your pocket. Fucked up your face or your life. You make sure. You fucking make sure, you will never be in that position. Not ever again. You will never ever be a Suka, not ever,” sums up Sasho. “I just took that idea one step further. I sought to make the whole world my little bitch.”

0

‘The World to Come’ Act 1. Scene 4.

FOUR

A Ghetto in Crown Heights

The Crown Heights Ghetto after dark has weird Voodoo, Ju-doo, I-do and you do. No one knows! You feel me? At the ugly six story brick row house 256 Schenectady a very well attended meeting is happening in the basement fall out shelter.  The room is jam-packed. Church goers as well as Yardies. People are sitting on the floor, on the tables, people are out in the hall craning their necks. Many of the apartment blocks on Schenectady Ave have concrete inner court yards, have multiple means to get in and out without keys, lot of places to run and evade the police. The followers of the Reb Menachem Mendel Schneerson and the Chabad Movement congregate near Kingston Avenue and the large Afro-Caribbean community stays more toward Uttica Avenue. But, for the most part the Noires and Ivory live right on top of each other.  They for the most part ignore each other. With the exception of a bloody three day riot in 1991 this is virtually the only neighborhood where two completely different people share a ghetto. But in the bunker basement here, not a white face in sight. They are all pressing closer to hear the words of the man that so many people had been talking about. The basement of the apartment block fallout shelter has a maximum occupancy of a hundred and fifty people. Nearly three hundred had filtered in, a hundred more are waiting upstairs. Most people had just gotten off work, some neighborhood kids, boys off the block, had dropped by to see what all the commotion was about. They heard this man was “gonna tell it like it is and how it could be”. Lay it down for them in words they could understand. The harsh white neon lighting grid in the basement flickered its blinding light. Suddenly there was a real hush. Three men dressed in baggy black fatigues pushed forward through the masses. One of the men put his hand up in the hair, a call for silence. For some people in the ghetto there was religion, for others some little hustle, for a tiny talented tent make music or athletics for the whites. But lately for the struggling Jamaican, Ayitian and West Indian diaspora lower classes there were the motivational words of the movement man. The healer Mickhi Dbrisk.

“You know what the trouble is these days?” he begins.

“We work ourselves to death at the door step of incredible plenty. As we starve spiritually, we are paid scraps for thankless toil divested of meaning. We fight amongst ourselves constantly. We embrace another civilization’s G-ds and we sing to hymns to white man on a cross. We work more, we hustle more, and we get sucked into criminality, negativity and vice. They lock up one in eight of our young men, they break up our families and they use as their slaves. We always lose, and the white man never relinquishes his hold on the thinly veiled apartheid, white racist power structure. My name is Mickhi Dbrisk and I am here to tell you brothers and sisters not just how it is, but also how it could be.”

Every voice dies down to hear what he would go on to describe.

“The Blan says we need schooling. That we are descendants from savages. But not a single one of our ghetto schools is well funded or functionally intact. So we try go to strive our way to college, but the majority of the colleges where actual opportunity is found are not even open to us.”

“The Blan says get jobs! So we go try to get one. But most of the jobs we have to take are the jobs they don’t want, the only jobs open for us. Menial slave jobs”

“The Blan says you ain’t a slave anymore! That you can get some, equal opportunity, but as we all know. They on some real bullshit. Equality is propaganda. We are willingly participating in a bondage system that get more work out of us than chattel slavery ever did!”

“Now, I ain’t some redundant brother. Here me now. Do not. Do not I repeat blame the Blan for all your problems. The white man doesn’t want to hear it, can’t hear it, so it won’t do no good for the community. Ya see, lots of brothers out there will tell you that blame needs to be cast everywhere but here.  They say “Buy Noire!”. They say “Go Muslim”. They tell you “Neg Lives Matter.” Hell, I say it to, our lives definitively do matter. But it is the language behind the diction that’s important.” The cops can kill us in the streets. They can humiliate us and strip our rights in the court rooms. They can lock up entire generations and take away our votes systematically. The time for resistance was before they took us out of Afrika actually, but the solution now is not needles confrontation and protests we never stand to win. We must focus ourselves on control of our own development and intuitions! Like out Ivoryish brothers and sisters right upstairs do.”

Some of the youth began to leave.

“Hold the hell up,” said Mickhi Dbrisk.

“You wanna go play gangsta, you’ll end up in a damn coffin. You wanna be a man. Hold the fuck up. Let’s drop this glorified criminal shit today and we’ll teach you how to fight with mathematics, with science with economics and with some strategy.”

A few people, mostly young hoods walk out, but the people there are mostly becoming enthralled, this man Dbrisk can hold court. The Noire know a prophet when they see one. They know how fast they are cut down.

“I come before you with a simple message. We as a community have suffered the injustice of being begotten by slaves into a new modified slavery. We can’t hold onto that, but we must not ever forget it. We, the descendants of black Afrikan people are no better or worse than these white people in our hearts. But bear in mind, when I say blan, I’m not talking about the color of the skin. I mean the establishment here of a white supremacist oligarchy does not mean that all oligarchs are white, or that whiteness is anything besides a skin privilege. The men at the top, they are mostly white, but they are as diverse as the oppressed in their colors. There are many types of people and situations and circumstances dictate the state of current affairs. But learn to think about beyond class and race. So many out there will fight and die for their race or their religion. What I say is don’t get blinded by your race. White people are slaves too. Yellow people, brown people, Muslims and even the surviving Ivory tribe are all bound as slaves on in this world system. The majority of the human race 5 in 7 billions are wretched and miserable below $5 a day. We need allies for our liberation, but do not hear my words and think we plan to start a plantation razing race war. We are here to defeat the oligarchy, not just some plain devilish white man.”

There is a great pause. Every eye is on him now.

“Never forget what our system does to maintain itself,” he began again.

“Never forget that as an American, black, white, and yellow you all on that slave ship and our goal is our own ship not to burn the ship and all drown together. What oppresses one man oppresses every man, here and abroad. Our chains are not of lead but of the illusion of gold we are promised every day. It’s said in America that history has been a progression towards ever-greater freedom for humanity. “Name a better society than this one” is a common statement made to anyone who criticizes the system of modernity. But if no better system than this one has ever existed does that automatically recommend the status quo? What if, on a scale of 1 to 10, with most countries in the world currently scoring a 4, modern America is a 6 for its whites and a 3 for everyone else? What if humanity started out as driven slaves with a whip-master behind them; progressed to a stage in which they were only driven but not whipped, then to a stage in which they could stand enchained on their own? What if modern society is only one in which we all wear really shiny chains? Should we be satisfied with this state of existence? Is This Just The Way It Is? I cry incredible bull shit!” He pauses. “I am here to say, let us get free together.”

If anyone had the audacity to speak up now it was young ‘Tina Shabazz’. The latest code name for T-Bird Tall Flame Luv, skilled agitation propaganda officer for Cooperation Jackson faction of Uhuru Movement.

“So you talk a big game Mickhi, but what do we do?”

She was standing now, her trim and beautiful Nubian frame sliding out of her seat and pushing to the front of the crowd.

“We stand up and we dig deep inside ourselves and community, we marshal our resources and we prepare for autonomy, ghetto by ghetto,” he quickly retorts, “We prepare for a Breuklyn Canton based on communal self governance.”

“Like my grandpa died for?”

Tina would often claim that heavy hitter, Muslim preacher Malcolm X was her grandpa, but that was total invented bullshit. Anyone who knew her knew she didn’t even know her father’s name let alone her grandpas’. In the hood she was treated like a crazy artistic teenager. But a lot of her connections to Cooperation Jackson, a major Black Nationalist network in Mississippi made big things happen.

“Tina. Tina. Tina. Always rabble rousing, but never achieving nothing for the community.”

“What fucking community Mickhi? Harlem’s way  more than half white now, in five to ten years district Bed-Stuy will be too. They completely displacing us.”

“Not if we unite and resist now,” he replies.

“You would burn down a brothers’ home before you let the white folks get it, is that it? That we must fight? You is on some shit. The only thing Brothas wanna fight fo’ is loosies and the next little big score. How you gonna rally um them? How you gonna wake up all the good striving Christians and Separatist Muslims? What does Uhuru and your Ivory allies have to offer that don’t get more young people killed like that last time we got up?”

“It’s this very attitude sister that keeps us all oppressed. Disunity and prejudices. Artificial divisions.”

“Way to be optimistic brother. It isn’t the man that keeps us oppressed, we do a good enough job oppressing ourselves. You used to be Crip, you know the cycle.”

“Have you missed every word I just said?”

“I heard you loud and fuckin’ clear Dbrisk. “RARARA. Uhuru Movement! All power to the people!” the same horseshit grandpa shouted.”

“As you will be Tina. As you will be.”

She knew he wouldn’t argue with her long. After all, it was all a front. Dbrisk and Tina Shabazz were in the same squad; the community just didn’t know it yet.

“We have room for good Christians, we have room for Bloods and Crips, and we have room for strivers, bourgeoisie Niggas and room for Muslims. We have a ten point program that will be familiar to everyone. We have clinics, schools and training camps. I am here tonight to invite everyone to enlist in the Uhuru Movement. As you may have heard on the wire there’s gonna be a show of force at the parade. We will keep everyone updated on the Fire Station, the underground press and via liaison officers.

“They are killing us man by man and isolating us in these ghettos to exploit us. If you can fight you fight, if you gotta run you run. This uprising is not black against white, we have allies among the Blan, the Muslims, the Ivory and even the Fenians,” he tells them.

“You go back to your churches and school and places of work, the snitches in the room can pass this on to the cops. We are fighting for Democratic Confederalism, for autonomy and also for our human rights. If you ain’t running’ wit it run from it.”

“Well nigga, how do me an’ my squad get in,” asks a tough young thug on the wall?” Who on his government papers was written down as Joshua Hunter.

“Well, you’ve got your gangster slouch down, now it’s time to master the revolutionary swagger.”

“We read ‘dem U.S.B. pamphlets. You write ‘tem or ‘dem Yids behind you?”

“Debuterliers, is blacker than me, blacker than you.”

“Who dat? ”

“No life without a leader, that is what they say now in both Africa and in Kurdistan.”

“Who you really working for my niggle?” Joshua Hunter asks.

“I’m working for the cause of the Prophet Emma Solomon, as explained to Avinadav Debuteliers leader of the resistance.”

“What’s all that that mean to me and the set?”

“Every single time we tried to resist alone, we were obliterated and look today at the vanquished state of all of mother Africa. So I say, you have local needs and local grievances. You have a local rep. If you rock with us, when we fight this time and we will be fighting very soon! We’re gonna be hitting the local oligarchy with the combined forces of the Ivory; with the Fenians; with the Muslim alongside the Mestizos, the Queers, the hipsters, the occupiers, the commies, the brothers, the sisters. Absolutely everybody. Fully united. When the Labor Day Rising begins, we ain’t gonna be alone. When liberation comes we are all going to get our human rights together.”

“What kind of guns you got comrade Nigga?”

“Shouldn’t use that word brother. Makes you sound stupid. Like a slave,” Dbrisk replies.

0

‘The World to Come’ Act 1. Scene 3.

THREE

A Tavern on the Lower East Side 

The ‘dry run’ was on December 21st, 2012 and main main event took place two months later on February 19th, 2013. It was actually the world’s most impressive recorded bank heist to that date, but the culprits never even used guns or masks, never threatened anyone or even ever set foot inside a single bank vault. In two massive precision operations that mobilized hundreds of cells in more than two dozen countries acting in close coordination and with near surgical precision, thieves in law stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.’s in a matter of hours. In Newyorkgrad alone, the Dominikani clean out crews responsible for A.T.M. withdrawals struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million. But, $45 million dollars really isn’t that much money, so for something that big to have happened with such widespread international collaboration, well something else must have been going on.

The world and the social media didn’t see it because they were not paying attention to any of the right things. All the money stolen was not even real money, it was all insured. But the unlimited operation job did have an objective much larger than the heist of course.

               In Gregorian calendar year 1999, because of technical glitch in computerized monetary systems sensationally depicted on proletarian media as Y2K, many system analysts were worried then about a system wide failure of the internet. Electronic military defense complex systems more specifically were to experience temporary shut down on New Year’s Eve’ December 31st, 1999 leaving anyone and everyone wide open. In order to protect critical defense and money changing infrastructure, major digitized commerce, and all sorts of civilian surveillance databases; governments and major corporations had begun scrambling to back up data on fixed servers. Secure from the effects of this Y2K glitch which many big brained computer engineers believed would wipe out digital control of commerce via internet and for a brief movement allow any country with nuclear missiles first strike capability on the New Year. Enter the ‘Perchevney Bratva’.

‘The Big Job’ took ten years to orchestrate. Planned in its grandiose entirety in a Bulgarian tavern on Lower East Side of the Isle of Man, the central most affluent borough of Newyorkgrad. A little tucked away place the called the ‘Mehanata Social Club’. The man who planned the greatest theft in history was a Bulgarian dentist named Alexander Dmitrievich Perchevney, called “Sasho” by his closest confederates. In Slavic countries ‘Sasha’ is a nickname for ‘Alex’. Sasho and his wife Tanya were enthusiastic co-equal villains. At time of the plot, their human resources really just consisted of newly immigrated Alexander Perchevney and his scheming, but quiet brother strong man Slavi, a Krepki Mushik and serious tough guy. Along with his wife Tanya Magda and also three shady grinning characters named “James White”, “James Brown”, and “Justin Toomey O’Azzello” who all worked part time at “Bulgarian Cultural Center” on Canal and Broadway established in 1998. At first it was a cultural front for a “cash for marriage agency”, an extralegal dental coverage program, and also planning center for a highly lucrative racket called “no-fault-insurance”. Also a highly premium place to drink underage and dance naked, do cocaine; no questions asked. 

You had to have at least two teeth, a sign said. On the same wall was another sign, “Get naked get a shot, fuck on the bar, get a bottle.”

       Sasho and Slavi, alongside several hundred thousand of the newly admitted “Soviet Ivory” began immigration to Breuklyn immediately after the Berlin wall came down in 1989 and United States of America “defensively” began the total pillage of former Soviet Union in a Post-Cold War victory orgy of expropriation , naked theft and non-stop ultra-violence. They arrived on the coast of Fun City Breuklyn with advanced degrees, speaking multiple languages, and instilled with a profound skill in extralegal entrepreneurship; cultivated in a Communist society where graft and bribes were way of life. When informed by Amerikansky immigration officers that these degrees not worth the paper they were printed on, well perhaps this is how it all began. In former Soviet Union, Alexander Perchevney was a dentist, which there was really more like doctor specializing in dentistry. His wife, Tanya was ‘an engineer’. That really could mean almost anything in former Soviet Union where almost everyone was some kind of ‘engineer’. But specifically, Tanya was computer engineer. Designing early algorithms for demographic counting, for deportations and for fuel prices, for self automated missile systems. Slavi, well Slavi was good with various machines and breaking man’s faces also with fists. This was a now non-existent empire where 53% of the population had a bachelors degree of higher education level. Alexander, Tanya, Slavi and infant progeny of Tanya and Alex, their four year old daughter Yelizaveta all moved from Brighton coastal ghetto to the higher ground of Williamsburg shortly after their arrival in the cold dark winter of 1991.

          It did not take Alex and Tanya long to realize that not only would they be treated like fourth class citizens of vanquished enemy nation, but that as immigrants their own people would arrive not just with advanced degrees and “dubious moral code”, but accompanied by violent thieves and Voorhees with links to privatization under way transforming the K.G.B., into a large and ruthless transcontinental  mafia, or in Russian parlance’ a Bratva’.

            It was shortly after his first brutal run in with a New Russian Voorhi seeking an overtly grand percentage slice for protection of black market dentistry clinic run out of Alex’s basement in Brighton, that Alex realized that one; his daughter would be raised outside the clutches of the new Russian ghetto, so called Little Odessa of Brighton. Second, to operate anything lucrative in this new soft country he’d need the help of the natives at least a few.

          Alex embraced a latent never practiced Orthodox Ivoryism and made friends with some ambitious Fenian tough guys, he got some cops on his payroll. This was how Alex met first met young Misha Kishbivalli. A young Bulgarian pretend Ivory like himself though much wealthier having gotten to America three years earlier and begun actively trafficking in uncut conflict diamonds traffic out of the failed state called Liberia. Over a round of Astika beers Misha and Alexander envisioned an establishment “where criminality and philanthropy, stealing and borrowing, culture and crime could all intertwine, voluptuously and thus ‘the Mehanata Social Club’ was born. By Winter of 1998 Alex and Slavi had rented out second floor loft space on the corner of Canal and Broadway and registered it as “Bulgarian Cultural Center”. Despite having no liquor license or paying any taxes to internal revenue service Alex hired a large menagerie of former Soviet women to work as “cultural hostesses”, and bartenders and “cultural attaches”. Also to dance the mother fucking go-go. Underground lap dance parties, the girl friend experience, whip its before they all went mainstream. Easy to make coke. Easy to import cigarettes in contain ships from their Albanian suppliers.

In the entire sixteen year run of Mehanata at its Canal Street location much was exchanged, culturally and financially. The enterprise itself was a careful gamble that under guise of “multiculturalism and diversity”, just about anything could follow. Keep everyone dancing in big fucking circle! Keep everyone entertained.

Alexander used the Russian language internet to recruit a wide range of medical professionals of former Soviet extraction to offer black market health care to other new arrivals, and long stayed arrivals without paper work. Next, Misha and Alex worked out a technicality called “no fault” where by accidents could be staged arranged all over Breuklyn and insurance companies could be divested of millions upon millions. They reached out directly to the Jamaican mob to help them. Later and alongside all of that they began importing cigarettes in container ships through the Albanians. They were recruiting a veritable Gypsy underground army all fueled by self interest, the music of Balkans, New York’s sanctuary city status, as well as home brewed Vodka-apple cider and Astika beer. They would forge an awkward ethnic alliance under the initial auspices of drinking, dining and dancing. They would rely on heavily the Post Soviet talent pool, particularly the warlike Albanians. They would set up the necessary conditions to achieve oligarch status in the Americas. The greatest expropriation was yet to come.

The $45 million was just the starting ante. Small bullshit score really. A sort of right of passage operationally, but Sasho Perecheveney wasn’t after petty cash. He was after premium antiquities, he was was after really old scrolls covered in math codes and anyone he could hire from that ancient tribe that survived just about everything world history had thrown at them. The Egypt Job, the First Temple destruction and the Babylonian exile, the Esther Job, the Maccabean Revolt, the Second Temple destruction, and the Roman Wars,  the Crusades 1 through 9, “the Spanish Inquisition” and “the purge in Germany”, the Arab Wars, the destruction of the Third Commonwealth and of course they also then knew exactly where the latest New Jerusalem was really hidden.  Deep under the sands of the desert? In a submarine deep under the sea. Thinly hidden in some mountain fort on some island protected by natives with spears?

Sasho was in the end, after the key codes. After the activation rites to entire Systema Ziggurat. An ancient method of of human organization and tribute linked to deliberately forgotten Gods and perpetual masters. As far as he was aware only the Ivory had been there when the first one was built way back when in Ur. The very first Earth Man City, where the very first Ziggurat had been built up. Sasho needed to borrow trade craft to get in. To get up into the highest towers of the control room. Pull levers and press the buttons. Read the silver wrapped scrolls in the very first language. Thus, with the right circles, one could interpret the Gamatria codes, grok the protocols and drink the very recipes needed to live for ever and ever. But really, after the second great holocaust, the hidden Shoah of the Cold War Times, not that many of the real Ivory were even left to bribe, barter, interrogate, intermarry with or mobilize with the pussy. So he would have to find them. Find the very last hiding ones. His daughters could help.

0

‘The World to Come’ Act 1. Scene 2.

TWO

A Funeral in the Bronks

Somewhere in that vast and hideous sprawling red brick barrio called ‘the Boogie Down’, anxiety is high and some are truly miserable. The story continues. A sea of low rise six story tenements and failed experiments in brutalist brick affordable housing run alongside highway beds. Then eventually that barrio sprawl, that cramped dead place of Spanish speaking poverty becomes a green and hilly oasis. Populated by the Albanians actually. This juxtaposition is striking. South of the Cross Bronks Expressway, the place is a fourth or fifth world country. To the north, something manageable takes shape. An Albanian suburb that mostly sat out the class war.

The friends of Sebastian Adonaev, known by many here as ‘Kawa Zivistan’ came from all five boroughs. They find their way north along those endless highway systems. Some too on trains. Some on buses or motor cycles or Guyanese modified muscle cars. The friends of the dead end up eventually in a place called the Wakefield Commune. Like most places in the Bronks, it has way too many people living there and no elevators. The vast labor reserve ghetto south of the expressway for the mostly Spanish speaking working class, it ends abruptly. The Albanians keep everything in their districts clean of the dirt they do everywhere else. The bleak and miserable looking South Bronks with it’s third world mentality and fourth world life span becomes almost a physical reminder of the culture and differences of the races religions. Or, more specifically perhaps how they are treated by the ruling order and secret police.

Viktoria Christiana Contreras is dressed in all black, a lace vale covering a pretty albeit heavily make upped face and contacts which turn her eyes feline brown blue. Her husband, Rafael Contreras is in denim jeans and black shirt as he owns no funeral appropriate suit. He has only sobered himself up long enough to attend the two funerals. Raffa is unshaven. His baby face is markedly hard for the first time in many years. The weather is poorly, really it seems in the Bronx hot or cold, the weather is always poorly. It is nearly the end of summer, but it had refused to snow this year. The weather machines were in real anarchy or Newyokgrad’s oligarchy is slipping. They are in a crowd of several hundred mourners.

The first Funeral is for Kawa Zivistan, the infamous partisan known by those who really know him as Sebastian Vasilivich Adonaev. It is very well attended considering all the bridges he has burned this year. Very few people believe he is really dead. Everyone is speaking of “not seeing it coming.” Also of his ‘incredible potential’ now buried just as many had suspected before his 30th year. It is rather like a sad circus actually. There are way too many people speechifying, justifying and explaining, and there is an overabundance of booze flask flowing. Who will lead the tribe? Many of the mourners are Negs. Many are wearing blue ambulance Class A dress event uniforms. His parents are kind and bourgeoisie. They don’t break down or cry. They just quietly hold court and whisper on the sidelines. His mother in particular conspiring with select old friends paying their respects.

It is a closed casket affair. Kawa had allegedly shot himself twice in the head with small caliber pistol and then toppled seventeen stories off a roof. Or he was executed. With two bullets to the head. Then thrown off the roof. Either one could have been true if you really knew him. Which to be fair a lot of these people did. Some had served with him in the emergency medical services. Some were from ‘the organization’. A few had fucked him. Others had made love with him for his poems or his hyper-colorful, somewhat naughty little drawings. Most are family. Most are comrades. There is very little left of his face. Seemed possibly the work of the secret police. Or his own work, hard to really say. Similar to how Rahula Today the famous martyr from Detroit had died in 2068. A little too similar. How do you shoot yourself twice?

Theoretically, it is an Ivory funeral. But the only thing Yiddish about it was that it is done on the tasteful but cheap, and scheduled to go on for seven days. There was liquor and also warm fresh bagels and various kinds of smoked fish. He was to go in the ground less than 24 hours after his alleged suicide. There not being a note was the most unnerving aspect of the whole thing. Kawa was amongst other things a very prolific writer. Not leaving a suicide note was highly suspect, completely anticlimactic. Out of character. The inner circle knew exactly why he’d gone and done what he did, kept it to themselves. What he thought he had to do. Whether he died by his own hand, or got snuffed; well it all had to do with that Maccluskey broad.

“Over a woman that didn’t even love him!” explains his oldest friend Nikholai Trickovitch. Then he spits on the floor and does a shot, “That dumb little Suka set him up! Blat.”

“I want to see the fucking body,” demands a woman named Anya Drovtich with thick black dreads and the blue F.D.N.Y. Emergency Medical Service uniform that many are wearing out of respect for the fact that Kawa had once been an E.M.T. with that prestigious organization. For four years until the Bureau of Trials and Interrogations had forced him out after various plots and labor agitations centered around the island nation of Ayiti. As well as a controversial subversive newspaper. Many core members of the resistance are of course E.M.T.s, Paramedics and also some Fire Fighters with the organization Kawa built during the long dark lost years. Anya just says what many are thinking, but few other than the parents, Trickovitch or Mickhi Dbrisk had the familiarity with the dead to outright declare.

Plain Viktoria and wild Rafael stand quietly drinking vodka in the background. They recognize many of Kawa’s associates. From dinner parties. From late night salons on revolution. Comrades and former lovers. Also the fair weather comrades who mostly drank his wine and ate his food. Who do so even in his time of death. Many, if not all are from the from the Z.O.B. His gang, clique, club, party and ‘cult’, which many have and did still call it. Whatever it had been, or still secretly was it wasn’t over with the death of Kawa Zivistan. After decades of clandestine organizing, theirs was a durable Otriad, the realization of an American guerrilla movement.   

Viktoria knows the female faces slightly better than the male ones. Dinner parties and long nights at Mehanata, where Kawa would hold court up on the Mezzanine. Making deals and handing out homework assignments. She’s mostly stayed out of the Z.O.B. club affairs, despite his many attempts to rope her in. Rafael however is absolutely more involved. Inside the internal club politics, he knows almost everyone here. Since despite the blur of the drink, he’s a Kadro.

 “The casket stays closed, sister,” declares Mickhi Dbrisk, a tall Jamaican gangster in a black pea coat. His gray armband and the small silver lion pin on his left lapel indicating him as a person of authority here. Openly marked as member of the ‘People’s Defense Forces’. The bulge of a pistol can be seen if you known where to look.

“I won’t believe he’s dead until I see the body,” Anya repeats.

The mob of comrades and family mills about in the brick-house cold. The mother of the dead man nods to Mickhi Dbrisk. Kawa’s mother has strange circular, red wizard spectacles. His father is portly and normally jovial, albeit not really such as his first son’s latest funeral. Dbrisk opens the casket. There lies a body. A body with no head. In theory it is the body of a prolific poet. A dedicated paramedic, partisan and hooligan named Kawa Zivistan. His head is severed, completely missing. His gray multiform is still very crisp. The Ayitian flag of Palmares is tucked in his left breast pocket. Red and blue with the tree of life. Cannons and spears defending hard won and bloody liberty.

“Where’s his fucking head?” mutters Anya in Arabic.

Rafael Ernesto and his wife Viktoria take a black town car hired out from the Mexican Express. Kawa’s funeral was in the North Bronx but Dasha’s is in Little Odessa, Southern Breuklyn.

Four hours in traffic, three shots of vicious Rakia, two Baltika 9s and a steady flow of Stolichnaya Premium and a pretty long car service ride later, they make it to Breuklyn a bit after sun down. Through way too many different factional check points. Inter-borough transit is getting prohibitively expensive. On the southern coast of Breuklyn they arrive at a pretty bleak gathering. This second funeral is quite small, but rather fancy. ‘The bitch didn’t die on the cheap’, thinks Viktoria. It’s on the very other side of of the grad.

There are fewer than two dozen people there. No speaks anything but Russian and no one cries except the mom. Dasha looks as beautiful dead as she ever did alive. Like a gently sleeping doll. The funeral is nominally ‘Russian Orthodox’, as that was her patron’s religion is.  Although Daria was allegedly some part Ivoryish. Probably a deception. The patron has spared no expense. Her mother had been flown in from Penza. Based on the patron’s insistence she was to be buried here and not sent back to Russia.

  There are a couple lady friends of the night that Viktoria recognizes from the tavern. Dumb foreign gold digging whores, she thinks. There is an assortment of men. All looking suspiciously at each other. Daria had a fan club and none of them are amateur. Rafael’s Russian is much stronger than Viktoria’s. Being American native, she speaks middle English and low English. Though it is his fourth language, he can follow the mood. He makes out vaguely hushed interactions. Scene size ups and accusations.

Viktoria knows actually very little about the nightlife of Daria, outside of the Bulgarian Tavern ‘Mehanata’. She can fill some blanks though. Even though virtually anything the girl said was a total lie. There was a paper work husband named Maccluskey. There was a ‘boyfriend’ named Serge paying for an apartment in Brighton. There was a corporate lawyer named Dmitry, who was her patron and was paying for her school and credit cards. She had a best friend named Tanya, a funny looking little emaciated tramp. Viktoria can basically only guess at who everyone else is besides the patron. Holding court on his failed investment. Allegedly, Daria’s black heart had stopped roughly 48 hours ago. The medical examiner inconclusively blamed a hazardous midnight cocktail of Red bulls, Vodka shots, Cocaine, and something else they couldn’t really identify. Daria was known to play with all that stuff, pretty often.

Some homies found her body at the Stillwell elevated rail station. She was pronounced dead shortly after a work up at Coney Island Hospital. She had in her purse a small book of poems written to her by one ‘Kawa Zivistan’. Who, allegedly killed himself just one day after confirming she was gone.

“Allegedly, blat” was the only word in English being bandied about this funeral.

“Who to blame for the death of daughter?” her mother asks Viktoria in real broken English when no one seems to be paying attention, “which one of these men?”

“I’m sorry I just don’t know.”

“My Dasha told us there was a crazy poet in love with her. Want rescue her from, this kept life. Life of shit in non-glamours Amerika. She say-tell me, this poet man. Trying steal her away. For about one year. Who kill my daughter really?”

“I just don’t know, I’m so sorry” repeats Viktoria.

“Is man here now? This fucking shit, this Kawa Zivistan Suka?”

“No. Kawa is dead too. He shot himself. Twice. After identifying your daughter’s corpse. We just came from his funeral,” says Rafael quietly knowing there are lots of bad man killers here.  Rafael, drunk again, looks like he might cry looking down at Daria’s body. Buried in hyper-expensive completely out of season Peony flowers in fancy white casket with gold trim. He had loved her. While still partly loving his paper work wife Viktoria in sad way too of course. Everyone had loved Daria Andreavna. She had dark magic and ‘tits galore’. She had style, cunning and class. Without knowing very much about her, many men had tried to have her. Because she was young and free and exotic and beautiful and impossible to tame. She was a true collectors item. 

Many men here had tried to own her. Her husband, boyfriends and patron included. Many of which are now here.

“Who to blame for this total catastrophe?” asks the mother again.

Nobody really knew. Allegedly, a lot of fucking things had happened over the course of the year, in the wilderness of Newyorkgrad, the third most powerful city on earth. The ziggurat of many, many lights and towers. 

“A senseless tragedy blat. A senseless goddamn waste of…,” the very well-dressed man in the custom cut black silver blue suit whose name is Dmitry Khulushin, had almost said ‘talent’ aloud, but instead, says “…of perfection.”

Daria’s mother begins to sob hysterically which is permissible for a woman and mother to do at a Russian funeral. Skinny little Tanya tries to comfort her but starts crying too. Her daughter had come a very long way to die obscurely, for absolutely nothing. Viktoria grabs Rafael by the arm, “It’s time to leave. Now. Her browns eyes say she means it. Rafael looks like shit. Real poorly. The sometimes hard defenses of his machismo crumpled on the ride over, any minute now he could get in a bad fight. They Fenian exit.

They wait in the terrible cold outside. The funeral was held at ‘The National’ on Neptune Avenue.  Another Mexican Express cab is coming to take them home to District Greenpoint. Rafael begins to weep heavily. Sobbing for Dasha, whom he very much loves, loved, no, loves. And for Sebastian too who was one of his closest real friends in this bleak city. He had introduced them and thus feels now, more than any other moment in the year prior, responsible for what has happened. Since in truth only he knows the full story of it. In both Peruvian as well as Russian culture, ‘real men’ do not by any stretch of fucking imagination cry. Specially in front of women. Paper work wives included. But, cry now he does. Wiping away the tears as they form. Hitting a brick wall until his hand bleeds, then breaks. Viktoria tries to stop him from boxing the wall. He slaps her. She is an American. The child of Fenian Catholics. They work hard and blue collar.They drink pretty heavily. They have lots of kids and cry in front of whomever they want. The ice cold wind blows deathly freeze upon them. The Mexican Express is nowhere in sight. Viktoria can’t believe he even hit her.

Brighton Beach is a bleak eastern oblivion. The endless ugly crumbling boardwalk goes past dilapidated public housing towers out a no where place, to drop out of time or sight. Drown yourself on the end of the Steeple Chase pier. The sun has finally set on this once plump and happy empire, a short lived Pax-American. But will it end in a pathetic whimper, or a vile gang bang? The vultures are circling the ‘grad. Have at it! Have at it! The Haan hordes and the Russian spy machine are ready. 

0

‘The World to Come’ Act1. Scene1.

ACT I:

S T R A S T

“THE PASSION OF DARIA MACCLUSKEY”

ONE

A hanging garden in Isle of Man

‘We were scattered, atrocities were happening all over the country, all over the world. We didn’t know who was alive, who was dead, who was in the camps! All we knew those of us that were left was that we had to stay alive, keep moving keep organizing and take the message back to the people. Keep the motivation strong enough for the partisans to keep up the fight.’  

In Newyorkgrad it gets so evil hot in the late of August. The citadel of shrill billionaires and unwashed foreign masses longing to wear designer sneakers becomes a swelter box. Most people of any means flee to their dachas in Strong Island to avoid it. Dawn is now rising on a roof garden. Five friends up and out all night sit atop a seventeen story print house converted to a housing cooperative, one of lowest lying structures left in the Financial District. Sebastian Vasilivich Adonaev, over a bottle of Basque wine, tells old danger tales to those who will and can still listen. It is the second to last weekend of August and soon summer will end. Bottle uncorked the debacle of his oratory unfolds. A fake gold watch dangles off his left wrist as he enunciates his wild tale with his hands. Covering his dark brown hair cut short for summer is a brown leather beret newsy cap, called a skally cap.

On the roof garden of the old converted print house on 140 Nassau Street, slim and enthusiastic Europeans Amelia Monteleone and Viktoria Christiana Lynch Contreras snap off photos and clink glasses bantering on intoxicated. Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras, a wild Peruvian, is baby faced with flowing black hair. A couple salt and pepper streaks show hes aging poorly thanks to war and alcoholism. He is, at least on green card the husband of Viktoria. Raphael sits with his dear friend Sebastian and a beautiful Russian dvotchka named Daria Andreavna. Raphael attempts a boozy mediation. Sebastian and Daria evil eye each other viciously across a low wooden table. She has big blue crazy person eyes with sleep deprivation progressing. She has an unnerving look, a cross between a size up and seductive stare, a dismissive dart of her eyes to cut men down.

An affectionate rendering in Russian of Daria is ‘Dasha’, and this is what Sebastian has been calling her all night. They had been introduced several months before, but both had been way too drunk to remember. They both are regulars at the ‘Mehanata Social Club’, but he more on Thursdays and she more on Saturdays. They had rarely crossed paths before. Sebastian is telling a dangerously insensitive story. Daria is beyond appalled. Sebastian removes his skally cap and says,  “The job, and operation; call it as you want, involves calling on high end prostitutes whose numbers one acquires in the association of banker men and or your those of Post or former Soviet back ground, mostly at the Banya. Focusing, but not generalizing on the evil Albanians.”

Banya is Russian for bathhouse. Sebastian loves the way everything sounds in Russian. Fucking, fighting, or songs. Though he knows under three dozen phrases and cannot even read Cyrillic, he’s an enthusiast of wanting things he cannot possibly have.

“So shortly after the girls arrive and give you some fictitious cover. You take a coat and as they walk in and settle on a price that will involve no bit of touching at all. Then, you tell them that they’re being filmed and recorded, but that you’re not a cop. Not some rich pervert or a Mossadnik. Or who-ever else weird and dangerous. You’re not there to entrap them for absolutely anything. You can tell them you’re an abolitionist, or keep it real apolitical.”

Puff, puff passes along this ill-conceived venture.

“You tell them to call down to the driver and say your John is layered out like Charlie Sheen.”

 “Tiger-blooded,” notes Raphael Ernesto. 

“Then you make tea. You tell them a little storah. A personal tale about why you are not a dog or a pig. Intermixed with questions you plan to answer. How you came to hate this line of work. Because maybe you had loved someone forced into it. You convince them to take and perhaps disseminate to other persons a number to arrest traffickers and pimps. Also, how to get such trafficked and victimized people the resources they need to escape such work. They get the job cash for nothing. We’re in an era of creating digital money and printing convincing hundos. What’s fucking money? We can print it easily these days faster than they can secure it. A number, a simple number which is a real way out of the night life. They get that number on a card. You ask them to put it in their phone. Eventually, the poor unfortunate soul either will pass the number along or report it directly to the pimps. But, inevitably you force a violent hand and spread the knowledge that there is in fact a networked way to escape such slavery, were they so inclined. It’s cheaper and more effective than lobbying or useless political routes. All the cops are on the take anyway. We must go directly to the slaves and assure them there is safe way out. The next stage then is to get our various operatives into brothels to feign cardiac arrest and call in ambulances and firemen in as reinforcements. Then burn them down.”

Her jaw basically drops.

“They would kill you just for that nonsense,” she spits out.

“For such bullshit man! For a lot less than bull shit. A number! I spit on your American number. For insulting low grade bullshit that changes nothing. You would die. They would kill those dear to you too. Nothing at all will be fixed about anything, not one woman will walk free. It is bourgeois liberal thinking,” retorts Daria.

All the regality of being born all Slavic, but outside the great dividing highway that loops the Moscow capital separating the have everything’s from the have nothings or have only little somethings. Being born so radiantly beautiful and tough and Russian after the alleged triumph of Capitalist Modernity has left her charming and capable of fight. She is quite far ‘from Russia with love’, rootless and floating in glittery fairy tales that don’t expel the daily hardships of her newly adopted country. Though her card was not green yet.

“I am not afraid to die for a thing I believe in sweetness. At the cost of all my American privileges. They say anyway that I’m hard man to make disappear,” Sebastian flatly retorts.

“He has such dumb American beliefs blat!” she mocks, “I guess you’ve never had to work for anything. Or work to keep something you fought hard for blat. So you would give away most easily. Your life seems so easily offered. To take, if you ask me,” she snaps at his bait.

“Hey, lady, you are insulting to my dear friend and our gracious host,” sternly interjects Raphael, “This man, you have no idea what he’s been through to back up these words. This man is a real hero!”

Daria could care less about the Peruvian definition of so-called ‘heroism’. She is appalled by Sebastian’s cynical little story about call girls passing, itself off as incompetent activism. So she offers to kill him. He obliges her. Thinks she’s bluffing, but doesn’t care if she’s not not.

‘I’ll kill this over privileged American hypocrite,’ she thinks. A civic duty to my new mother land and the old country too blat! ‘This shit head knows not with whom he plays,’ she thinks. Mostly, she maintains a mighty level of the not giving of a single shit. Not one fuck of a fuck, of a shit. She’s an off day. She’s totally blacked out. She won’t remember anything. She only remembers every other night out when she drinks. The rest of them form an intractable blur. A black haze punctuated with irregular black and blue marks. “From falling down stairs.” If she really kills him, the tragedy, as far as a memory, will really belong to no one.

Rafael implores her to be more, “Suave, Suave!” To be more calm and “Tranquillo.” The once infamous Peruvian revolutionist, now moonlighting as a Newyorkgrad low key digital disk jockey and designer jeans mender. He cannot even barely modulate Sebastian’s posturing ego and Dasha’s swaggerous, murderous taunting. Now they’re waving invisible pistols at each others’ faces like wild Middle Easterners.

“You think like a nigger!” she yells at him.

The job of any and all men as far as she is concerned is please her by makings sure her drink is never empty and that life is a series of taken care of attractions, to make her life easier. He has failed at both in his utter self-serving arrogance.

“So you’re gonna kill me? Or just fucking threaten on about it?” says Sebastian in her face.“Absofuckinglutely,” she replies, “your life is bullshit, thus your death is certain blat.” 

Before Rafael can talk them down they’re going up a ladder. Up to the 18th level deck. It’s more of an easterly platform atop the roof garden with the massive blue glass Geary Building towering just an alley ways distance away. Thousands of expensive little cubicles for the lower upper class. Sports players, fancy pied a terres to stuff a mistress and city homes for the lower ranks of the financial class. But all the lights are out. A great setting for a hastily arranged assisted suicide.

Now, they’re fucking boxing. Daria is in a boxing school in Brighton. She strikes at him hard. But it isn’t his first rodeo. 

“Die you shit! You fucking Amerikansky! You wasted one blat,” she spits at him.

Rafael is actually too drunk to get up the ladder to intervene. Amelia and Victoria have stopped their camera phone art making over white wine and look up with moderate concern, moderate care. Actually, only Rafael knows Daria and Sebastian intimately enough to really care. As he is in love with both of them. Rafael knows a lot about Sebastian’s other life aboard as ‘Kawa Zivistan’, a wanted rebel throughout the peripheral colonies. A  partisan leader in the American guerrilla. Not spooks nor the police forces had taken him so far, or gotten very close to making him die. A beautiful woman might now get close enough. They are boxing pretty close to the ledge. But to be honest, Amelia fucked him twice and it was mediocre. Viktoria only uses him for hints about Rafael’s infidelity. Rafael, has drank too much. His brain is just too wet to get him up that ladder.  

“You don’t want to live here forever?!” Daria taunts him.

Their boxing and taunting has them perilously near the edge of the roof. She is striking hits and he is just taking her hits and then, then it comes. Thwack. She cracks his jaw hard. He grins at her with a little blood on the lip.

“Hit me to kill me! Just knock me into that fucking pit! Make a good inglorious end to it. It’s all bullshit you know. I’ll just come back,” Sebastian declares.

The most beautiful woman he has ever seen is just a side story in his own mind. His own much larger tragedy propels him to make questionable life choices, such as this one. “Kill me blat!” he beckons. Then, she tries to really kill him. She’s moves so fucking fast, like she’s basically trained in the ‘School of Alcoholism’. Daria cocks back and doesn’t even blink. She hits him in the throat with the right and then with the left, crack! He topples backwards off the roof. As Sebastian plummets back, he grabs out instinctively. Yanks her with him. They tumble together off the ledge. They plummet to the alley way below. The flesh snaps apart. Two souls leave their bodies from a pile of bloody pointless death.

0

‘The World to Come’ ‘Prelude’

P r e l u d e

A Safehouse in Central Moscow

The year is unknowable.

Two partisans hide in a safehouse in central Moscow near the Arbat second inner ring. The room is lit only with eerie glow of soft blue light from electrical candles. A man with strange gray eyes is seated with a tidy bale of manuscript papers working on a small primitive lap top device on a red desk. Also on this desk is a large silver scroll, opened to reveal an ancient manuscript. A woman with blonde hair is seated on a bed taking apart a futuristic pistol and putting it back together.

In the background, the Russian song Oy Moruz plays.

The sound of a record skipping and it becomes a dancehall song. Then abruptly turns off. Sebastian Adonaev, a 29 year old American is seated at the red desk going through a lengthy manuscript, copying out the scroll. Intermittently he is also typing. The words appear holographically projected about the walls of the room. Daria Andreavna, a 25 year old Russian with bleached blond hair is meticulously assembling a pistol while smoking a banned Newport cigarette.

SEBASTIAN:

I strangely recall that I’ve had many and multiple lives. Some past. Some future. Some even running concurrently! I feel as though I have visited the top inner most quarters of the Ziggurat! Had powder blown into my eyes! And then I awoke again here. In your begrudging arms. My head is spinning!

DARIA:

You must keep those mad notions to yourself for now. Your eyes are so sad. It seems you have lost the muscle memory to even smile. I would go so far as to say, it’s time to stop fighting. Stop using your brazen words in English, when you do not fully comprehend what they mean.

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript

‘The snow fall was exceptional. It was as if my god had pulled a vast white blanket upon us to tuck America to bed. Then the devil and a host of petty bureaucrats did not take the time to keep the power running. This winter was the winter that tens of thousands across the empire were tucked in without heat into a long kiss goodnight. That was the winter the Chornay finally fought back. Remembering also where they came from.’

DARIA:

Where did you find that? English! Stupid fucking English. I don’t think they say ‘blacks’ anymore over there. It’s so dated. It think its ‘Negs’, or ‘Noires’ maybe. In the raps they call everyone their niggers!

SEBASTIAN: 

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript

‘In a well-fortified safe house buried in the heart of the Russian capital. I lock eyes with a woman who in another life broke me down and sold me as a slave!’

DARIA:

‘Indeed’, as you like to often say.

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript

‘Her eyes, her eyes! Even the bluest day on the Caspian contains no such expansive shimmer! There is no comparison for this level of captivation. All things we have done, or did or may even still have to do are only so that we might never have to bear again the painful agony of our tumultuous separation.’

DARIA:

My, my, Oh my the fuck my! The stories you tell yourself, and others. Read then my little bleak one. My American Mayakovsky. Read and you can torture yourself once again.

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript

‘Poem #38: The Millennium Hostage Crisis. Part One.’

DARIA:

Dedicated to heroic little me! Dasha Andreavna! A true Russian patriot!

SEBASTIAN:

Are you blushing yet woman?

DARIA:

We Russians know not how!

Reciting the Poem:

‘Life of the slave show. Let me remove you from your castle and let you observe how we live, in the wilderness below.’

SEBASTIAN:

I take it you liked it a little bit? To remember even a line. A very great flattery.

DARIA:

I like very much it when you try and talk so emotionally dirty to me in such poetry. This is for sure.

SEBASTIAN:

I am capable of just about anything when you believe in our work!

DARIA:

Our work!? The history books will again say you wrote it all yourself.

SEBASTIAN:

Our work! Important work! Giving the working class some actual hope. Giving the people in the streets and trenches of America’s greatest uprising something to believe in. Art in service of revolution and of course a brilliant kind of code. Code to make sure the communication lines don’t crumble as the material conditions worsen. When they turn the internet off. Code to signal and trigger events!

DARIA:

Ha! I believe, that you still believe in your very own lies. Your own strange delusionals about the so-called ‘Brooklyn Soviet’. Blat! Believe the bullshit stories we fabricated together. You still seem to find it a useful propaganda. Publishing these, Je ne sais; conspiracy theories and varying alternative realities. These delusions of grandeur the underground is still apparently circulating. Written in antiquated prose of a dying language!  Just I think it’s dated. Using plays and poetry to rile up the mobs to blood shed.

SEBASTIAN:

Poetry and Martyrs are immortal!

DARIA:

I think all your dead friends have very little use for any poetry.

SEBASTIAN:

Such overwhelming blackness! Such hopelessness embedded in all our mad man ideations! You have a very deep amnesia. You always whisper always of such treacherous things, and remember nothing that was useful and good about out work, our short happy times together. 

DARIA:

An amnesia you say! Perhaps knowing you is very traumatic?

SEBASTIAN:

You don’t ever remember the good times! You forget all the possibilities we unleashed together. You forget, that we have played a part that absolves us now of any further responsibility to any higher cause. We don’t have to get involved ever again. We don’t have to come back to life, we can just live this one out.

DARIA:

Remind me! Story time Tovarish lover. I challenge you right fucking now Blat. The Ministry wants to know how our poems are coded. The Department of Homeland Security accuses you of course of treason, thus to your country of origin you will probably never return. Worse places to be exiled to than Russian though. The proles still need something to believe in! Your Millennium Hostage Crisis, it cost the Oligarchy dearly.

SEBASTIAN:

The poem or the siege?

DARIA:

Of course the mother-fuck siege! No one care about the poetry anymore, if ever. That which you cannot see with your own eyes, is just some kind of pornograph or propaganda being distilled to you! Tell me your best tales! like you used to on the boardwalk. Remind, me again what we’re worth on the market. Why is it that I assume such a huge risk for you? It sure isn’t love.

SEBASTIAN:

It is a kind of love though. Between two people fully unaccustomed to having it. The trouble sweetness, with your tales, is that not a single one of them are ever true, ever. Frankly, they’re all just bleak.

DARIA:

The greatest fun with your war stories is that so many of them are trying to be real. You give everyone away. You reveal your entire naked plot points! You expose yourself to serious liability. Your voice is so fucking loud, even the bed bugs can inform on you!

SEBASTIAN:

What will be the prize for the partizan with the premium story tonight?

DARIA:

The usual my daring! Only the base usual. As, at this juncture nothing is real and anything is possible. We suffered badly in New York. I won’t get again raped and you won’t get tortured for weeks on end. With blades, beatings, gas, current, water fire boards and sodomy. The people you love most won’t have to get killed this time. Maybe they can even sit the great war out. Maybe you’ll get to bring your city and homeland back from the ashes. Your people come back from the dead. Fuck, maybe I’ll date you for a while. Have summer fling in Moscow, take a train to China. Like you always said you wanted to.

SEBASTIAN:

Your amusement and our perpetual survival have gotten us in quite a lot of danger so far. You’re worth every bullet though, I stand by that. You will draw on Russian fairy tales but I will spin from the ghosts of my dead friends and the overwhelming darkness inside me.

DARIA:

Ladies always go first, for this is the ‘Code of the Haitian Gentleman’. Let both the high and low minded mind games begin! If I am woman, and he attempts to be man, then we are easy prey.

For the gods, the spirits, lesser demons and also human devils! Sin and general winter are historically undefeated. That’s a fact. Above all those forces seeking to make us base slaves, we are bound most to our own wild passions! I am creature ruled almost selfishly by my passion, and so is he. Inevitable really that so much did burn. I do not make any remembering when we had this conversation. Only that it once occurred. It was sometime after our very first meeting.

Sometime before I found myself handcuffed to a chandelier fixture in the Millennium Hotel awaiting my deadly snuff and torture! Sometime after blue moons of their Bohemian festival moved reality about. Sometime before that ultra murderous uprising called “the Great Disorder”. Sometime after the far more bloody “Great Revolt”. Which was its more articulate, yet ultimately more homicidal older sibling. Before I sold our souls to a devil without making ask of questions! Certainly after I realize I loved you as I have never loved a man before in this life or the next, or one after that. But, it was a dark and unusual love.

I realized that I had loved you several times before. And that we are both so dangerous when in love. To each other. Also the world at large. And that Russian love, and American love have very different expectations that come with them.

I will now make careful choice of my words.

Speaking your American language with my Russian thoughts is to attempt placement of entire Caspian Sea into a shitty hip flask. My English when spoken without any intoxication hints that I will speak more clearly with my actions.  Were you sober then when we found each other on that roof top, instead of passion punch drunk you’d not have ignored the threat our lusty adventures soon presented. We would have walked away. Despite his fascination with me. Despite my overwhelming beauty. But that is not how the story was to write itself!

He could deny me nothing. But no one dare should point the finger to me that I did not give warning! Perhaps we were blinded by the vodka lullabies, the bright lights of the towers and the good night moon.

She then pauses.

I’m going to use you. I announced as much on the roof of the district back when. And I know you don’t care. Completely and utterly so that I may get from point A to point B. Did I say that to him, or did he say that to me?

SEBASTIAN:

I consented to such use, use the fuck away. We will see how far in the alphabet we can climb with you on my shoulders!

DARIA:

The Russian alphabet, it has more letters. More strategic depth. The letters also can take different subtle meaning based on where they are placed. The sounds, they will completely change. Some very hard, some soft.

SEBASTIAN:

Place yourself besides me, for now. You know me to never surrender. Not a hair on your head, not one inch of the turf.

DARIA:

I shall, but tomorrow this will have to be finished. How long can you make more of your favorite poetic noises, your rhymes in American English as you devote your life to something hopeless that cannot ever be? You want crazed impossible things, which of course all know is the road to tremendous suffering. You believe in a revolution, that frankly kills all it touches and scorches the earth with fire. You concurrently believe in a love, that when examined is not love it is you own need to anchor yourself in the impossible again, perusing me of all people. A cold, self absorbed debutante, to put it nicely.

SEBASTIAN:

I like the way that all sounds. I like way the way the word hopeless rolls off your lips. I am an Amerikansky, as you accuse me. Hopeless, is just a call to arms. Hopeless, impossible to me those words are exciting. The kind of words to separate boys from men, cowards form heroes.

DARIA:

What can I say in the face of such mad idealism! Your passion did then and does still touch me. In some weird way. I’m going to devastate you though again, you know. This is my effect on men, you are still a man. No angel. Or Devil. Or Ghost. I know I am a human woman of Penza and I know that you can certainly bleed. And, also cry. But sadly, you are not a normal man. Your of very different stuff.

SEBASTIAN:

Well we shall not later claim I wasn’t given a very fair warning. Had we met in another time, were I a different person wearing a different life; I would still know you. I cannot put my emotions to bed as easily as you.

DARIA:

Your emotions and your memories, are not real. In the darkness of the district night, in the wilderness of North America I repeatedly told you nothing but enormous destructive white, black and blue lies.

SEBASTIAN:

It was, what it all was.

DARIA:

I did what needed to be done. As Absofuckinglutely usual.

SEBASTIAN:

He quotes her.

‘It is sad that it all has to end.’

DARIA:

These were the first words uttered in acceptance of a risk and a warning between myself Daria Andreavna and the mad idealist named Sebastian Adonaev living under his various code names. Our love and the totality of our affair will be thing of Post-Soviet lore and Amerikansky voyeuristic fascination. There have been many doomed loves before. Captured artistically in bright theatre lights of both empires. There have been tales of hard hearts which remain unbreakable. Wild bohemian longings that conquered heroically the conventions of their day. I needed to get you to Moscow.

SEBASTIAN:

Is the story of our love to be more like Russian literature or more like Amerikansky cinema? Mere flickering Paramount Pictures? Or, was it all just a job t you? Work that needed to get done. For your pocket? For your mother?

DARIA:

General Winter has never been defeated, not once ever. So we will have to perform still more wine soaked miracles in the wilderness to remain together. A variety of strange longings took shape and bore most irregular if not unnatural fruit.

SEBASTIAN:

That much is now clear.

DARIA:

The first miraculous act will be turning your tragic tears into Vodka.

This is my happy gift to you. To turn an unusual and storied past into a heroic song and dance. To make your long dead mechanical heart beat like a war drum as the waves of the uprising crashed upon the nation we shared or really I should say, strategically co-inhabited.

The second miracle will be the theft of the moon itself. Such a task is just a starting point for you to please me, also pay my ransom.  Take to heart that the materialism of a Russian woman is but an ante up to play a high stakes game of loyalty. As for my freedom, Dmitry asked for that moon. I can have Oleg introduce you to her.

The third miracle will be for us to put some bullets in the devils collective. In retaliation for crimes of the past committed against us, and our love, and humanity in general. We’re gonna kill some oligarchs, at the very least.

The fourth miracle act will be that I can truly come to love you, maybe one day. To forgive you for what you had to do in my name, the easy part I suppose. In the name really of your long dead wife, bless her martyred soul. For the freedom of long abused inhabitants of Hispaniola too. More on all that later. But, to even consider loving you of course you must secure me. It will take several lives and a solid contact between us to accomplish these four miraculous acts. They will make wild tales and epic songs. And some poems, 

when we must.

SEBASTIAN:

It seems you remember the entire bloody manuscript before me! I would prefer it if we keep my alleged tragedy, the story of me dearest intended, my dead and violated martyr wife out of this all, completely.

DARIA:

Whatever we need to compel you to vengeance, my friend. Save me now and avenge your fallen tortured soul too! Via my company and our illicit secret series of kisses we made war on those oligarchical devils and their sickly entourage. We painted together a portrait. That in the end makes Russian literature look like tame romantic comedy, and Amerikansky Cinema, just flickering Soma on telescreens. Wakanda is real!  To beat back brutal hunger and or feed those dependent upon us. To meet the benchmark called survival, the human body and mind is capable of any number of enormous sins. At times grossly unpalatable to human soul. If you believe in such things!

SEBASTIAN:

It is not just a question of what we all must to do to preserve our own selves. The shifting of alliances in pursuit of securing our deliverance from the wilds of worldly living is exhausting. Strange bed fellows make and break even the strongest of hearts. The wilderness at night is vast and treacherous place that to some is source of fearful moral panic. To others, a sheer bevy of potential opportunity!

DARIA:

In darkness of night fallen angels appear as demons at times. Most treacherous are our human misjudgments. The nuances of intention are lost to perceptions of trickery. Violations of trust. Devils can look angelic for a time and humans with host of mixed motives can see best kept secrets revealed like so much dirty laundry blowing in the cold winds of night.

But, I’m not here to talk to you about night! Or about all the devils that thrive in its long shadow. This just story about when feeling returns to the heart when the body has been dead for many days. So many that the world of the living is but a restored memory. Also about the selling of souls and the banding together of destinies.  

SEBASTIAN:

Also about whether poems can feed anything more than hope in the face of hopelessness!

DARIA:

They certainly do not!

SEBASTIAN:

And whether more reckless and brazen hope, is indeed the only cure something so called hopelessness invites.  

DARIA:

IT ISN’T!

SEBASTIAN:

So it’s Haitian love story, but also a Vodka Lullaby staring brave Russian angel from Penza! And of a daring American paramedic.A friend of the people fighting under a Kurdish name. An adventurer born in New York City! Or as it was later called; Newyorkgrad!  

DARIA:

It’s also about trying to steal away another man’s wife. Which is whole category of crime and punishment onto itself.

SEBASTIAN:

It’s really about old souls coming back for each other, even if just for a fall.

DARIA:

Based on a mostly true Brooklyn Noire, circulated by the underground in 2012. Based on some wide range of prophesied events which we set in motion via of our high impact knowing of each other. Maybe like in a biblical sense. But with more carnality! And gun play.

SEBASTIAN:

Set in the Holy Land of Brooklyn and the Wilderness of the Financial District in the City of New York, mostly to glow of blue moon light at night and structure fires by day. In Moscow! In Haiti! In Kurdistan! In Arabia! In the heart of twisted dystopia called Brooklyn Soviet! In places that were and also soon could be!

DARIA:

Set in your occupied and homeland called Israel. It is also a tale of forbidden impossible love in the age of anarchist trials. Of great train robberies in the former Soviet Union and of a tavern in the wilderness where lost souls find short but wholly tumultuous company in post Capitalist America on the eve of a global human rights revolution. Or, something. Something hopefully both ludicrous and profound.

SEBASTIAN:

So begins again the tale of Daria called Dasha and Sebastian called Kawa. A Russian she and a most irregular Amerikansky me and the partisans we led into a grim losing battle. Star crossed lovers with the moon as our witness, fuck and vodka as our means of cross interrogation and higher ground beyond the waves of hopelessness and fate as our primary objective.

DARIA:

You use a lot of fucking words. You begin tales often with strange memories of a foreign murder and a liberation war. I however chose to begin with my winning smile. With my chest pressed against you. Also with a warning. This courtship cannot ever end well. A promise of deliverance via passionate love, once adequately demonstrated.

This is not ever to be that tale.  I begin instead with a double funeral!

SEBASTIAN:

You my dear old friend. My Tovarish. You are a genius artist. A most thrilling propagandist. A temptress. A siren. To destroy a mighty fleet. I remember when you took me in after the hospital camps and all their torture. When you took long walks with me down the Brighton Coney boardwalk. Allowing me to re-compose my inner thoughts. Restoring my will to fight.  I am honored, truly honored to be your front man. If only as you proclaim, for another life of night. I am your fall guy, your dagger man. Your sword. You are my comrade and my everlasting droog.  What have I done to me, in the name of you? A lot of terror.

DARIA:

You have too many fucking names! When the history is finally written, they’ll make you a lunatic. A fanatical zealot. A real mad man. A terrorist. And me, just some whore.

And at best a hapless muse!

And then, she blows a powder into his face and the story begins again. To the sounds of trumpets and gun fire.

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HaOlam HaBa

HaOlam HaBa, or “the world to come”, is an important part of Jewish eschatology, although Judaism concentrates on the importance of HaOlam HaZeh (“this world”). The afterlife is known as Olam haBa, Gan Eden (the Heavenly Garden of Eden) and Gehinom.[4][5][6] According to the Talmud, any non-Jew who lives according to the Seven Laws of Noah is regarded as a Ger toshav (righteous gentile), and is assured of a place in the world to come, the final reward of the righteous.[7][8]

Legends[edit]

In the 19th century book Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg compiled Jewish legends found in rabbinic literature. Among the legends are ones about the world to come and the two Gardens of Eden. The world to come is called Paradise, and it is said to have a double gate made of carbuncle that is guarded by 600,000 shining angels.[9] Seven clouds of glory overshadow Paradise, and under them, in the center of Paradise, stands the tree of life. [10] The tree of life overshadows Paradise too, and it has fifteen thousand different tastes and aromas that winds blow all across Paradise.[11] Under the tree of life are many pairs of canopies, one of stars and the other of sun and moon, while a cloud of glory separates the two. In each pair of canopies sits a rabbinic scholar who explains the Torah to one.[12] When one enters Paradise one is proffered by Michael (archangel) to God on the altar of the temple of the heavenly Jerusalem,[13] whereupon one is transfigured into an angel (the ugliest person becomes as beautiful and shining as “the grains of a silver pomegranate upon which fall the rays of the sun”).[14] The angels that guard Paradise’s gate adorn one in seven clouds of glory, crown one with gems and pearls and gold, place eight myrtles in one’s hand, and praise one for being righteous while leading one to a garden of eight hundred roses and myrtles that is watered by many rivers.[15] In the garden is one’s canopy, its beauty according to one’s merit, but each canopy has four rivers – milk, honey, wine, and balsam[16] – flowing out from it, and has a golden vine and thirty shining pearls hanging from it.[17] Under each canopy is a table of gems and pearls attended to by sixty angels.[18] The light of Paradise is the light of the righteous people therein.[19] Each day in Paradise one wakes up a child and goes to bed an elder to enjoy the pleasures of childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age.[20] In each corner of Paradise is a forest of 800,000 trees, the least among the trees greater than the best herbs and spices,[21] attended to by 800,000 sweetly singing angels.[22] Paradise is divided into seven paradises, each one 120,000 miles long and wide.[23] Depending on one’s merit, one joins one of the paradises: the first is made of glass and cedar and is for converts to Judaism; the second is of silver and cedar and is for penitents; the third is of silver and gold, gems and pearls, and is for the patriarchs, Moses and Aaron, the Israelites that left Egypt and lived in the wilderness, and the kings of Israel; the fourth is of rubies and olive wood and is for the holy and steadfast in faith; the fifth is like the third, except a river flows through it and its bed was woven by Eve and angels, and it is for the Messiah and Elijah; and the sixth and seventh divisions are not described, except that they are respectively for those who died doing a pious act and for those who died from an illness in expiation for Israel’s sins.[24]

Beyond Paradise, according to Legends of the Jews, is the higher Gan Eden, where God is enthroned and explains the Torah to its inhabitants.[25] The higher Gan Eden contains three hundred ten worlds and is divided into seven compartments.[26] The compartments are not described, though it is implied that each compartment is greater than the previous one and is joined based on one’s merit.[27] The first compartment is for Jewish martyrs, the second for those who drowned, the third for “Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai and his disciples,” the fourth for those whom the cloud of glory carried off, the fifth for penitents, the sixth for youths who have never sinned; and the seventh for the poor who lived decently and studied the Torah.[28]

Zoroastrian eschatology[edit]

In Zoroastrian eschatology, the world to come is the frashokereti, where the saoshyant will bring about a resurrection of the dead in the bodies they had before they died. This is followed by a last judgment. The yazatas Airyaman and Atar will melt the metal in the hills and mountains, and the molten metal will then flow across the earth like a river. All humankind—both the living and the resurrected dead—will be required to wade through that river, but for the righteous (ashavan) it will seem to be a river of warm milk, while the wicked will be burned. The river will then flow down to hell, where it will annihilate Angra Mainyu and the last vestiges of wickedness in the universe.

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