By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Maxwell Book
BBC-Guardian UK - Honduras - ESPN NY Mag
LITERARY UN GATE, April 17 – Today's UN was full of corruption and it was time to publish it systematically. He knew his time was short. He published as he produced, or as he researched. On this one he started with a half dozen UN fat cats.
First was the one who had kept him banned for all this time, refusing even to answer a letter Fed-Exed to her by the pro bono law firm Quinn Emanuel: Melissa Fleming. She was banking with Charles Schwab, while doxing refugee children and relently censoring any criticism of the UN or, in particular, her boss Big Tony Guterres. Was there anything between them? People had speculated. But it wasn't her, dead and dumped in Hunts Point, as Kurt Wheelock fresh from the Larry Ray trial investigated.
After no response - no surprise - Kurt moved down that line.
There was a Ukrainian UN official, strangely silent during this war: Vitaly Vanshelboim. Had he been one of the at least 25 UN officials who had been ordered by Melissa Fleming's Department of Global Communications to not call what happened there a war or even invasion?
No way to know, since Fleming and spokesman Stephane Dujarric - who did not make any public financial disclosure, from his penthouse on 86th Street nor his spread in the Hamptons - refused to answer. Vanshelboim owned two residential properties in Ukraine. What was their condition now? He also banked with Citibank, still in Russia. Calling it playing both sides off against the middle, while he stole money from a housing program at UNOPS, in Ghana and elsewhere. He was classic UN. But he has only one of many.
Another global go-getter, hired by the UN in the previous political era, former South Carolina governor David Beasley, now growing out his beard and shooting selfies and glad-handing with Dujarric. He owned multiple properties and invested in First Carolina Bancshares, took loans from them too. A conflict of interest? The UN was full of them.
Alicia Barcena, a decade in her job in Santiago after having threatened to oust Kurt from the UN for the first time when he dug into another mysterious UN death, that of a woman who went out a window and died beyond the Glass House, Maria Gabriela Di Biase. Barcena owned two properties in Mexico, and owned the UN in Chile outright - also a good friend of Honduras now ex president and narcotrafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez, about to be extradited to the United States and SDNY where Kurt was waiting for him.
With Amina J. Mohammed, Guterres' deputy, the corruption was right on the surface, barely veiled. The very week she was supposed to show back up at the UN for her new job - she had talked trash about Ban Ki-moon but that was nothing anymore, given what Guterres was doing -- Amina J. Mohammed had stayed in Nigeria, backdating thousands of certificates for endangered rosewood from there and Cameroon to be sent to China. She owned no fewer than seven properties in Nigeria. And what was being done in them?
Last for now, or most recent, was Guterres' new chief of staff or chef de cabinet Courtenay Rattray. He had blocked Inner City Press on Twitter since even beginning this job, back when he was Jamaica's ambassador to the UN and palling around at fashion shows of models in the UN Delegates Dining Room. Some of those went missing too. His properties and stock were in Jamaicia, and in the Scotia group. It was global and he would continuing until this situation was resolved. It could take a while.
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