By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Maxwell Book
BBC - Guardian UK - Honduras - ESPN
SDNY / Hedge Fund World -- The Larry Ray trial was bifurcating into a public and a private version. After the outing of the John from Cambridge Advisory Group Stuart Piltch, next the prosecutors put on the stand another John, this one an editor, Randy Levinson. He required immunity.
He was asked, Are you here under subpoena?
Yes.
Would you refuse to testify citing your right against self-incrimination?
Yes.
Immunity granted. Then a seedy yet banal tale, of how even in lending Claudia Drury money Levinson had angled for more, the dropping of the sex price from $600 an hour to $300 an hour to zero. You'll have to see me a lot to pay this back, he wrote.
Claudia Drury for her part described clients on crack, clients hurting her, and the relentless pressure to give money to Larry Ray and Isabella Pollok. Why hadn't she just run away? It remained a question.
So too what to do with the other Johns. Kurt proceeding cautiously, first with Fomba Sirlief, then the Gap couple, an artist historian, the Yale architect. But there were so many more.
The judge knocked off the trial at 1 pm and said publicly, see you Monday. But Kurt called in to the Judge's 3 pm conference and heard the pro se prisoner plaintiff being told that the judge was busy on a trial, that it would be rescheduled for next week.
Kurt ran up to the 15th floor or ran across the 8th floor hallway with its views out over Chinatown and took the elevator up to 15. The judge's court room doors were not locked; Kurt stopped in the antechamber because there was bald men inside. It sure looked like Larry Ray. Why was there no notice of this in the docket? Kurt made these complaints before, when he'd first gotten here, and it had never worked well. He went back down and wrote a story. There was the lobbyist from DC, with a firm that represented Maduro of Venezuela, the DR Congo which was shirking its debts elsewhere in the courthouse, and a party in Afghanistan. At least that one was international. What about the hedge funder with his name on a museum? Kurt had the name. And the museums, on Patreon here. #JohnListGone
[It, like a song about Lev Parnas was also covered, behind a paywall, by New York Magazine which had this to say about Inner City Press' covered in late 2021 of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, book here via one of the companies with an executive on the John list.]
When Inner City Press for investigative reporting was roughed up and thrown out onto First Avenue from covering the United Nations of/by UNSG Antonio Guterres, many did nothing. But as we've previously noted, the First Amendment stops at First Avenue. We'll have more on this, here and on other platforms.
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