By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Maxwell Book
BBC-Guardian UK - Honduras - ESPN NY Mag
LITERARY S. BRONX / S. LEBANON, May 6 - It was the last day of evidence in the Alexi Saab trial but Kurt Wheelock could get out of his mind his screw up with Nabil Abboud. Kurt wondered if he should tell the prosecutors - no, never! - or one of Saab's lawyers. But would they just try to use it for a mistrial, rather than try to save the lady's life?
Kurt knew a few other people from Lebanon, but none from that particular village. Nevertheless he tried, never putting it in writing but setting up phone calls, meetings near the UN, whatever was more convenient for the people he was trying to get to help. How to sound the alarm without becoming involve in it? It was like the Heisenberg principle. Except that Hezbollah TV was involved....
* * *
The closing statement in the Hezbollah trial in SDNY was simple: Alexei Saab is a terrorist, and there is no time limit to the charge. Saab's defense was less clear, and seemed to say that Hezbollah wasn't really against the United States - what about "Death to America," Kurt Wheelock could imagine jurors asking - or at least wasn't effective at it.
Also not effective: Kurt's attempt to warn the woman whose name has been said during the trial and which he had inadvertently passed on to Nabil Abboud in Astoria. Kurt had put out dozens of emails and WhatsApp message, anyone he could think of over there. In courtroom 318 where the crowd, small to begin with had now further dwindled, Kurt kept checking for replies. None. Maybe it was the lack of cell phone reception.
The judge's legal instruction to the jurors was sixty pages long, and Kurt had already read (at) it. So he went out into the hall, then into the staircase of 40 Foley. It was better lit that the one in 500 Pearl that he used to make phone calls and do video rants in. And now a response. And it was crushing.
"You're too late," it said. "She is already dead. Killed yesterday. Thanks."
It was the "thanks" that killed him, figuratively. Thanks for giving out her name? Thanks for covering the trial? If he hadn't covered the trial he would never have heard the name. The Heisenberg Principle indeed.
Kurt ran back to 500 Pearl to watch the UN noon briefing on his laptop in the fire stairs and record a two minute voiceover. But he was rendered speechless. There was Nabil Abboud, sitting proudly with the correspondents from Reuters and Al Jazeera who had worked with UN Spokesman Stephane Dujarric and Big Boss Tony Guterres to get this thrown out. Abboud asked a question, pure propaganda and get it answered. He was a favorite of Guterres, if the notoriously anti-press Guterres could be said to have any journalist friends. He only liked the ones who did his bidding. Like this one.
* * *
A verdict was expected in the Alexei Saab trial that Wednesday. The jurors had spent all day Tuesday hearing the closing arguments and then the 60 page legal instructions. They'd gone home before 5 pm, and came in at 9:30 am. The wait began.
Kurt Wheelock was in the case to the end, even as Nabil Abboud passing on the woman's name and getting her killed turned around and around in his mind. Another terrorism trial was on the horizon, more than one.
There was Melzer, with the Order of the Nine Angles. And Saipov who had run over people on the West Side Highway and now, in the MDC in Brooklyn, wanted a clock radio in order to know what time to pray. Kurt covered that latter then ran back to Courtroom 318. Nothing.
At 5 pm on the dot the judge summoned the jurors back in, asked how they were like the transcripts and highlighters they had ordered up, then sent them home. Maybe tomorrow would be the day. For now, Kurt left the courthouse and headed north on a Citibike, one of the new electric ones.
Abboud wasn't answering his cell phone - probably blocking Kurt's number - but Kurt got through to Abboud's office mate, a South Korean journalist known even before Kurt was thrown out of the UN by Guterres to be getting abused by Abboud. Even physically, which was strange.
"He's up on Sutton Place," the man from Chosen Ilbo told Kurt. So Kurt headed the ten further blocks north.
And there he was, Nabil Abboud going into Big Tony Guterres' mansion just north of 57th Street, being greeted by the UN Security team that protected Big Tony and brought him things. Things. Things like dead women.
The Alexei Saab jury reconvened on Thursday and most observers - they were dwindling - thought that a verdict would come that day, as early as the morning. But it wasn't until past noon that they sent out their first note of the day. They wanted to know about venue. Oh and they wanted to know if they had to be unanimous about "theories of liability." The judge said they did. No verdict was reached by 5 pm and he sent them home.
Kurt Wheelock, stuck in Courtroom 318 most of the day waiting, was now free to head back to the UN. He was angrier than usual, having seen a headline that Guterres, the man who gave Hezbollah TV space not only in the UN press corpse but apparently in his Sutton Place mansion as well, if only as a procurer, was reportedly calling for Hezbollah to be disarmed before the May 15 elections. What a crock. What a Big Lie by Big Tony. And now he was involved and implicated in femicide, in South Lebanon. And the South Bronx?
* * *
It was the third full day of deliberations in US v. Alexei Saab and now audio was replayed in Courtroom 318 for the jurors to hear it again. Saab was read his Miranda rights, then confessed to hiding small weapons in his house for Hezbollah. Open and shut, Kurt Wheelock though.
But the afternoon dragging on, and nothing. Two other trials came to a close. Horse drugged Lisa Giannelli was quickly found guilty, while the SEC lost its civil right against former Nomura trader James Im. But what about Alexei Saab?
Finally at 5 pm the judge said he had been given an incomplete verdict form by the foreperson, with only five of the seven counts filled. He said he was going to return it to them, without disclosing what the verdicts were, and tell them to return on Monday. Kurt shook his head, marveling too at the (at least) two recent deaths linked to the UN mansion on Sutton Place. Would it be another big weekend for Big Tony?
LITERARY UN GATE, April 15 -- "This is only supposed to happen on Long Island," Sergeant Rosario said. It wasn't clear if to his driver Cory Witmer, or to Officer Linares who had found the body.
She was tied up and naked, and dead. That and the location of the dump, in the weeds behind the Hunts Point Market, had all the markings of the murder of a prostitute or whatever term they were using now. Escort. Sex worker.
"This is some Joel Rifkin b.s.," Rosario continued.
"Or Gilgo Beach," mused Linares, who was younger and watched Netflix on his phone. While on duty, often parked down here at the bottom of the confines of the Four-One precinct..
IV.
In a four story mansion in Manhattan a reclusive man watched the news of the dead woman found in The Bronx.
It was not Jeffrey Epstein - sure Ghislaine Maxwell had been described telling his most artistic victim to watch out when she jogged by the river, but she was still around to say it - but the more corpulent Antonio Guterres. And the mansion was paid for not by Les Wexner but rather the public.
As Secretary General of the United Nations Guterres had a hard job, he told himself. It took a hard man to do a hard job. His double chin was growing, jiggling while he pontificated about fossil fools at the UN Security Council stakeout and then left with security without taking any questions. But underneath he had the same drive as in Geneva, that long decade when Catalina had refused to move with him from Lisbon, and left him alone in a mansion.
It was her fault, Guterres often thought, as he waited for those that UN Security would bring him. The specifics of this supply chain he didn't focus on. Something about Talia's List. And now this, a badly dumped body. Couldn't the UN do anything right?
V.
It wasn't just that the UN's Big Tony club sometimes filmed themselves - sometimes, without their knowledge or ability to censor, they got filmed.
It had happened in Tel Aviv, the white UN four by four of UNTSO, the sex in the van the video of which was published by the blogger Big Tony hated, and who in turn came to hate him.
At first Tony's spokespeople ignored Kurt Wheelock's written questions - Big Tony has already had him thrown out and banned, but they'd said they'd answer in writing so it wasn't censorship - but then other media picked it up. Some credited Kurt and his website, or Twitter account.
And so the same UN Office of Internal Oversight Services which had helped Tony cover up Fabrizio Hochschild's sexual assaults on the 38th floor was deployed, promising an investigation of what anyone with a laptop or cellphone could see.
Three men, it was said, were being reassigned. With full pay, Kurt quickly pointed out. But for most of the media which had reported on the video, the case was closed.
Now this: a body dumped in Hunts Point, and talk about a "Blue Plate Special," not meaning a diner deal but the blue license plate on diplomatic and UN vehicles. In his mansion Big Tony ranted, How stupid could they have been? How stupid indeed. Kurt was digging into it. But of course, they were digging into him - and they had immunity.
To be continued - and see Inner City Press Patreon here
To be continued.
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