How Trump's Real Estate Holdings Attract Kleptocrats

[douglas9]

In 1983, a doughy, muttonchopped 32-year-old named Jean-Claude Duvalier had a problem. A dozen years earlier, Duvalier—known as “Baby Doc” to cronies and detractors alike—had ascended to the presidency of Haiti, following the death of his autocratic father, “Papa Doc.” Almost immediately, Baby Doc smothered any talk of reform. Haitians watched as opposition activists went missing and independent media went silent. Any hopes that the country’s democratic revolution of nearly two centuries prior would finally come to fruition vanished.

But Baby Doc wasn’t a staid, stale dictator in his father’s mold. He had a kind of malign joie de vivre, an almost sociopathic need to make the most of his time crushing the Haitian populace. His multimillion-dollar 1980 wedding, perhaps the most lavish ever in the Caribbean, featured a 101-cannon salute, $100,000 worth of fireworks, and, as the Washington Post reported, a setting that “hid [Haiti’s] poverty behind a façade of papier-mâché roses.” Duvalier dabbled in crimes against humanity—including housing political prisoners in jails dubbed the “triangle of death,” many of the prisoners suffering in unspeakable pain before succumbing—while regime supporters made sure any critical journalists were tortured or exiled for their reporting.

Looting state coffers, pillaging local populations, pocketing as much national wealth as he could stomach, Duvalier built a personal nest egg worth upward of $800 million—enough to place him alongside genocidaires like Slobodan Milosevic (looted wealth: $1 billion) and crooks like Peru’s Alberto Fujimori (looted wealth: $600 million) among the great kleptocrats of the twentieth century. “If this money had been invested in clean water projects, we would have saved so many thousands of lives,” an investigator who tried to track Baby Doc’s assets later related to me. “That, to me, is the legacy when I think of Duvalier.”


https://www.thebulwark.com/how-trumps-real-estate-holdings-attract-kleptocrats/

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Great read w/loads of detail.

i.e.

There on the contract was the description of the unit, the signature of the notary present, and the details of the purchase itself. All formal, rote stuff. But on the second page of the contract—hovering just above the names of Baby Doc’s lawyer and shell company—was a scrawl Americans would become familiar with in the years to come. It belonged to a man who would come to dominate America’s luxury property market, America’s reality-TV programming, and, in time, America’s politics.

PS: Would the Kevin McCarthy who worked for Baby Doc be the same who works for Dimdonnie Drumpf?