[HN Gopher] A lavish lifestyle strains credibility (1985)
___________________________________________________________________
A lavish lifestyle strains credibility (1985)
Author : class3shock
Score : 96 points
Date : 2024-03-25 21:58 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chicagotribune.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chicagotribune.com)
| class3shock wrote:
| I'm posting this because it is an amazing story but also because
| I'm wondering if there is anyone in Greece that might know of
| what became of Takis Veliotis after he fled the US?
|
| His name comes up only once after the 80's in relation to a court
| case involving his son and wife in 1998:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240129182146/https://casetext....
|
| Some additional links for the curious:
|
| https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/19850712_IB85067_4a31a9...
|
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/1985/12/04/from-general-dynam...
|
| https://magazines.marinelink.com/Magazines/MaritimeReporter/...
| stavros wrote:
| There seems to be nothing on him in Greek on the web, the only
| mentions I can find are in English, so they're probably ones
| you found already. Someone on Twitter said he's still in
| Greece.
| dirtyhippiefree wrote:
| Considering the state of the Greek economy, I perceive he's
| living "off the grid" like a king. With decades behind him,
| he likely won by remaining invisible.
| stefanos82 wrote:
| Based on
| https://www.ancestry.com/search/?name=Panagiotis_Valliotis I can
| see without having an account that he died in 1999.
|
| Yeah, the surname is not Veliotis in search query, but the system
| finds it as 'Panagiotis Takis Veliotis'.
| yakito wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240329125152/https://www.chica...
| ClearAndPresent wrote:
| https://archive.is/Ikgw8
| abeppu wrote:
| > A federal grand jury in New York indicted Veliotis in 1983 on
| 17 counts of fraud and perjury, and he is being sought as a
| fugitive from this prosecution. He lives in Athens.
|
| > Top Navy officials acknowledged after Veliotis fled that they
| had were worried that he might compromise national security, and
| a major internal investigation was conducted to determine how
| much information he might have. Its results have not been made
| public.
|
| I wonder if anyone knows -- why was he able to hide out in
| Greece? Apparently the US had an extradition treaty in place with
| Greece since the 1930s. Especially if he was a security
| liability, you'd think the US would have greater than normal
| motivation to pursue extradition.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradit...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Greece isn't as tidy when it comes to administration; I
| wouldn't be surprised if he lives in relative comfort in a
| house under someone else's name, and nobody official comes to
| check.
| dirtyhippiefree wrote:
| >Greece isn't as tidy when it comes to administration.
|
| Bingo.
|
| Winning by becoming invisible.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| I don't know about Greece, but many countries do not extradite
| their own citizens to other countries, and include the
| provision that they can refuse extradition of their citizens in
| their treaties. France is one such country, hence Roman
| Polanski. Greece-Canada treaty has this provision too, so I
| suspect Greece is similar.
|
| > _The Requested State shall not be required to extradite its
| own nationals. Nationality shall be determined as at the time
| of the offence for which extradition is requested._
|
| https://www.treaty-accord.gc.ca/text-texte.aspx?id=103324
| keybored wrote:
| This is only surprising because it's the US. I mean if the US
| security apparatus says "national security" all of the
| _allies_ are supposed to drop everything and send them on the
| first military plane back across the Atlantic.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Like that US woman who killed a kid in the UK would be
| extradited? I guess lucky her hubby was in Intel and the UK
| cops were bamboozled.
| jajko wrote:
| Polanski spent decades in Switzerland (small luxury ski
| resort Gstaad), not so much France.
|
| I dont claim to know the details of his case, but setup above
| is generally not uncommon, swiss even have special residency
| permit for folks bringing millions+ into the country, no need
| for pesky jobs like us peasants.
| tokai wrote:
| Must have concluded that he didn't know anything really
| compromising. Else he'd just get an extraordinary rendition.
| abeppu wrote:
| I thought extraordinary rendition was
|
| a) started later and aimed at "terrorists" (and it seems hard
| to argue that this guy is in that category)
|
| b) used to take people to black sites in 3rd countries, not
| to face charges or detention in the US
|
| ... and because of its dubious status under international
| law, it seems like it would be not a good look as a response
| to corruption issues?
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| If Greece is anti-death penalty and there would be a chance of
| that, they would not extradite.
| abeppu wrote:
| > A federal grand jury in New York indicted Veliotis in 1983
| on 17 counts of fraud and perjury
|
| Hold up, even the US doesn't do the death penalty for fraud
| and perjury right?
| philwelch wrote:
| [delayed]
| JasonFruit wrote:
| My immediate reaction is to doubt some of this: isn't it what
| you'd expect to read about someone who agrees to testify against
| a well-funded, well-connected defense contractor? It was a time
| when the press was the undisputed king of information. But then I
| read that the case against General Dynamics fizzled and the one
| against Veliotis did not; maybe I should look at it as a caution
| against excessive skepticism.
| noobermin wrote:
| With stories like this, it's surprising the US even "won" the
| cold war. It feels much more like the Soviet Union collapsed than
| the US won.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I think that's exactly what happened and also strikes me as the
| only way to win a cold war short of surrender.
| wpietri wrote:
| I'm far from an expert, but my understanding is that the USSR
| was well more corrupt at the time. Something that provided a
| firm foundation for Russia's current situation, with Putin as
| gangster-in-chief:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/13/alexei-na...
| snakeyjake wrote:
| Comparing Soviet corruption to US corruption is like comparing
| a decapitation to a papercut.
| pfdietz wrote:
| In a way, the Soviet economic system only worked as well as
| it did because of corruption.
| ta_1138 wrote:
| It's a common problem in all kinds of low-perforing
| governments: You get extremely tough regulation that makes
| it very difficult to do any economic activity legally, and
| then you can bypass said regulation with corruption. The
| high barriers to entrepreneurship, or just constructing a
| building or buying materials are a feature, as it means
| more advantages to those that can ignore the regulations.
|
| We can see this even in relatively well functioning states:
| Say, when you make infill development expensive, but
| provide tax abatements to compensate, but said abatements
| must be approved by a board of aldermen or something like
| that. Being able to control who builds more cheaply is
| valuable, an then you just make sure that you only vote yes
| to good friends that patronize your cousin's consulting
| business.
|
| The less discretion the bureaucrat has, the harder it is
| for them to be corrupt. And in the soviet union, they had a
| lof of discretion.
| underlipton wrote:
| Only if you consider what Americans tend to consider
| corruption. If you, instead, get a little creative and
| include things like segregation (essentially a massive state-
| sponsored in-group grift that cost the country an untold
| fortune in the lost proceeds of misallocated capital, primary
| among that being the very concept of the modern suburb and
| the automobile-based infrastructure required to head off its
| ever-imminent lack of sustainability) and a great deal of our
| foreign policy (meant to direct funds into the coffers of the
| MIC and the politicians directly invested in it, at the cost
| of untold blood and treasure)... well, we've been pretty damn
| corrupt.
| _pi wrote:
| yeah the funny thing about these comments you have a bunch
| of people conflating a lot of stuff.
|
| For people who think the USSR was "more corrupt" they're
| often talking about a narrow conception of corruption that
| is defined by the US on technical terms. Or they're simply
| talking about the behavioral differences between rich vs
| poor countries.
|
| Boeing's quality issues are a great example because it's
| very obviously corruption, but not in the US technical
| sense. But the reality is that Boeing and the US government
| basically said yeah fuck it, do your own QA for the 737 Max
| and then after the fuckups turned around and said okay we
| won't charge you the full fine. And that would have just
| gone away if the 787 fuckups didn't happen. Now suddnely
| people look really bad giving Boeing sweetheart enforcement
| deals.
|
| Americans think corruption is a cop pocketing $ on the side
| of the highway, but it's not corruption when the cop
| confiscates $ on the side of the highway without trial,
| gives it to his police department, which pays out the
| confiscated funds as bonuses, new equipment, and other
| various frivolities.
|
| At least the Soviets spit in your face when and how they
| wanted to and were limited by physicality. Americans make a
| Rube Golberg machine where saliva of their oligarchs is
| collected throughout the day in massive quantities and
| piped out of the building where it happens to land on your
| face 80% of the time. Then they will tell you it's your
| fault for being in the way of the spit pipes.
|
| We cannot recognize corruption in the US because our
| corruption is mechanical, and we've precluded that
| mechanical things cannot be a form of corruption.
|
| USSR corruption was more visceral and obvious, that's
| pretty much it. This makes a lot more sense if you
| understand that all measures of "corruption" don't define
| corruption but use the perception of corruption.
|
| Another example. Ukraine is a corrupt country, no doubt
| about it. But the "anti-corruption" NGO complex in Ukraine
| essentially prevents certain laws from passing like
| sourcing laws which exist in all major developed countries.
| They see these laws as a form of corruption, which in and
| of themselves they're not. The other reality is that a lot
| of the anti-corruption NGO's are corrupt. The reason they
| argue against sourcing laws is because foreign entities
| stand to lose money if Ukraine has to buy a certain
| percentage of goods from Ukrainian factories. Foreign money
| buys NGO's easily there, so NGO's don't' want their funding
| to dry up. So everything is in stasis.
|
| But by Western standards none of the above is "corruption"
| because while the people making these deals can likely
| speak freely, by Western standards it's really easy to hide
| this corruption as coincidental and unrelated business
| decisions.
|
| In reality corruption itself is an industry because it's a
| way to make money and a tool to make money with. Corruption
| is not a really simple thing to adjudicate
| snakeyjake wrote:
| >instead, get a little creative and include things like
| segregation
|
| There is a persistent myth that Communist Russia was an
| egalitarian paradise. I believe that his is primarily due
| to propagandistic efforts to pull third world countries
| into their sphere of influence through token displays of
| friendship.
|
| During the Cold War, ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union
| were treated just as bad as US minorities.
|
| Today the situation is even worse. The Ukraine war is being
| used as, among other things, an excuse to ethnically
| cleanse the Russian Federation of ethnic minorities.
|
| https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/02/24/2-years-into-
| ukrai...
| _pi wrote:
| > During the Cold War, ethnic minorities in the Soviet
| Union were treated just as bad as US minorities.
|
| This part is simply not true.
|
| > Today the situation is even worse.
|
| This part is.
|
| The USSR was never institutionally racist. Russian
| chauvanism was still a thing in the USSR and that was
| relic of the Tsarist era that keeps on giving.
|
| The USSR's repressions were not a cut and dry wealth
| transfer between ethnicities unlike the US policies.
|
| At their worst in terms of American morality,
| institutionally targeted programs were to enforce
| political control and break nationalistic tendencies of
| ethnic groups.
|
| The vast majority of the repressions in the USSR were a
| result of the explosive growth of productive forces. It's
| very hard to make the case for the USSR that the benefits
| of those productive forces inherently benefitted Russians
| over everyone else.
|
| It's very easy to make the case in the US for white
| supremacy.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The USSR was never institutionally racist.
|
| I think you are misusing "institutionally" and mean
| something more like "openly" or "explicitly", because
| everything you cite in support of this describes rather
| than refutes institutional racism.
| _pi wrote:
| > because everything you cite in support of this
| describes rather than refutes institutional racism.
|
| Please expand on this.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Institutional racism includes institutional policies,
| practices, and structures with racially/ethnically biased
| effects, not just those with explicit racial/ethnic
| targeting, and even moreso not just those based on
| racial/ethnic animus.
|
| The justifications upthread are a mix of explaining
| deliberate bias as not based on animus and explaining
| biased effects as not being deliberate bias; neither
| refutes institutional racism.
| _pi wrote:
| Okay how about this. Tell me which policies of the USSR
| were racist, who they were racist against and why you
| think they were racist.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > During the Cold War, ethnic minorities in the Soviet
| Union were treated just as bad as US minorities.
|
| Even that is a blatant understatement. AFAIK, the US
| didn't do any explicit genocide.
| _pi wrote:
| Uhh Japanese internment and Mexican repatriation were
| genocidal actions. The US only stopped mass stochastic
| involuntary sterilization of natives in the 1970's. Some
| still happen to this day.
|
| If you don't know your own country's history why are you
| speculating on the history of the USSR?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Uhh Japanese internment and Mexican repatriation were
| genocidal actions
|
| No, they weren't, "genocide" has a meaning, and neither
| of those fit it; it doesn't just mean "bad". (OTOH, you
| ar every much correct that the Native American genocide
| continued in the period in question.)
| _pi wrote:
| This is a semantic argument that I have no real interest
| in arguing.
|
| Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing. Genocide as a
| criminal charge is mostly a political matter.
|
| California literally admitted that they targeted citizens
| of Mexican descent for the explicit purpose of illegally
| cajoling them into emigration and enforced deportation.
| You learn about it euphemistically as "repatriation" (if
| at all because almost no HS curriculum teaches this)
| because oopsie.
|
| If the USSR rounded up all the Japanese and put them in a
| camp, you wouldn't hear the end of it in the West.
| Roosevelt himself used the term concentration camps. You
| learn about it euphemistically as "internment" because
| "they had a good reason to do it, and sometimes you know
| we get things wrong!!". An argument that can really only
| be used if you prelabel good guys and bad guys.
|
| The main difference between US camps and USSR camps is
| that the US camps were nicer and had food.
|
| The quality of repression scales with the wealth to some
| degree. The USSR couldn't support the same quality of
| life for their prisoners that the US could.
|
| Today the US refuses to provide the same quality of life
| for their prisoners that less wealthy OECD countries do
| provide.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Roosevelt himself used the term concentration camps.
| You learn about it euphemistically as "internment"
| because "they had a good reason to do it, and sometimes
| you know we get things wrong!!".
|
| "Internment camps" and "concentration camps" are
| historical synonyms, the latter has subsequently taken on
| additional negative loading because of euphemistic use of
| the term for German _extermination_ camps.
|
| > The main difference between US camps and USSR camps is
| that the US camps were nicer and had food.
|
| That's... A fairly substantive difference. Detaining
| people without just cause is bad. Doing so without food
| is murder.
|
| WW2 era ethnic (primarily, but not exclusively, Japanese)
| internment in the US was definitely a violation of moral
| human rights, as were numerous post-WW2 efforts targeting
| people in the US of Hispanic/Latino ancestry, often on
| the pretext of illegal immigration. Neither was
| genocidal; not all bad things are genocide.
| _pi wrote:
| > "Internment camps" and "concentration camps" are
| historical synonyms, the latter has subsequently taken on
| additional negative loading because of euphemistic use of
| the term for German extermination camps.
|
| This is completely wrong.
|
| The term concentration camp was invented in the Second
| Boer War. It described a tactic of war used by the
| English against to Boers and native Africans. Because
| Boers and Africans did not have centralized cities and
| lived off the land rather than having industrialized
| farming the developed tactics of disrupting the supply
| lines didn't work on them. The supply lines were too
| horizontal.
|
| So first they burned and salted the land so that Boers
| and Africans could no longer subsist. Then they forced
| the people whose lives they destroyed into what they
| called concentration camps.
|
| ~50k people died in these concentration camps essentially
| every 3rd person that went in.
|
| The forcible population transfer at gunpoint is what
| differentiates concentration camps from internment camps
| which were used by the Spanish in Cuba in the Ten Years
| War.
|
| Unlike the English who simply treated humans like cattle
| and forced them to move the Spanish evicted Cubans and
| killed those who did not comply after 10 days. The US
| took the English route for the Japanese, while using the
| Spanish name to differentiate themselves from Nazis who
| also ran concentration camps.
|
| Likewise it's really funny to say that GULAGs were
| genocidal while US internment wasn't, because literally
| there's less intent (in the Western legalistic sense) of
| genocide in the GULAG case. GULAGs were equal opportunity
| in terms of ethnicity. Japanese internment wasn't. GULAGs
| were a problem because the USSR got addicted to slave
| labor relations that it recreated from a previous era,
| the USA of all countries has no real standing to
| criticize it on those grounds because the US still does
| this to this day, which is why the old Sovietologists
| were grasping at straws to ideologically differentiate
| between two similar systems. The big 4 western theories
| of the function of GULAGs (Solzhetsyn, Consquest,
| Applebaum and Bauer) literally do not include ethnic
| cleansing. That's a neologism.
|
| There's no point in continuing the discussion since you
| literally do not even know the history of what you're
| talking about.
|
| Edit: To make it crystal clear.
|
| The difference between the GULAG system and the Soviet
| population transfers and the US internment and
| deportations that gives more creedence to US commiting
| ethnic cleansing is the ethnic composition of the
| material benefactors of those actions and their victims.
|
| The people who were victims in the US were targetted
| minorities who were disposessed of their wealth by their
| fellow white citizens.
|
| The people who were victims in the USSR were not targeted
| minorities, and the benefactors were not an ethnic
| majority whose main benefit was taking their victim's
| property.
| keybored wrote:
| The US continued, the Soviet Union fell, and the successor
| state transitioned to a corrupt oligarchy. How's that not
| winning?
|
| The Cold War wasn't about a clash of ideologies. And if it was
| then Russia becoming a corrupt capitalist nation rather than a
| corrupt communist one would be a win for the other side.
| dingnuts wrote:
| I hate to be this cynical but are we sure the US hasn't also
| become a corrupt oligarchy?
| keybored wrote:
| It is but I don't see the relevance.
| krapp wrote:
| It absolutely has, and that isn't even controversial[0-2].
|
| [0]https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cbo-american-
| wealt...
|
| [1]https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
|
| [2]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-
| poli...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _are we sure the US hasn 't also become a corrupt
| oligarchy?_
|
| Guess how we can tell you've never actually lived in a
| corrupt oligarchy, and only read about it on the internet.
| 7952 wrote:
| I guess it depends what you consider winning. The west won
| both WWI and WWII, but only the latter resulted in a long
| term peace with Germany.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > It feels much more like the Soviet Union collapsed than the
| US won.
|
| That _is_ what happened.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > It feels much more like the Soviet Union collapsed than the
| US won.
|
| Soviet union just collapsed faster than US. US was in orders of
| magnitude better shape after WWII. This gave it >5 decades
| longer slippery slope than USSR had. But it will collapse in a
| decade, especially if it attempts to go head to head when China
| takes back Taiwan in 3-5 years.
| _pi wrote:
| Yeah the reality is that a lot of people think that prior to
| and after WW2 and/or the Russian revolution the USSR was
| equivalent somehow to the US. That was never the case the
| USSR was a backwater and always behind. Tsarist Russia was a
| backwards undeveloped slave state. In that light the USSR
| punched above its weight.
|
| The reality is that rapid industrialization regardless of
| your ideology is an extreme productive process which
| magnifies the effects of production which are not in and of
| themselves free of negative outputs. In USA capitalism like
| in USSR communism the negative outputs of production are
| simply ignored and the people who they affect have no choice
| in what negative effects they must bear and what is being
| produced.
| yks wrote:
| Iron Curtain is what saved the US from being corrupted by
| Soviets. Now there is no barrier and Putin can freely use his
| unlimited funds to "create outcomes" via corrupt US
| politicians. I'm surprised China didn't get to do it first but
| I guess they have a branding issue of being "godless commies".
| It's difficult to see how the modern West can withstand this
| corruption.
| _pi wrote:
| The Iron Curtain was the barrier erected by the Soviets to
| prevent American media into the USSR. Not to prevent Soviet
| media into America.
|
| What are you even talking about?
| _pi wrote:
| There's some apocrypha that I'd need to dig up the source to
| but IIRC the story goes that after WWI Keynes was researching
| the economic impacts of the WWI war economy. His conclusion was
| essentially that if normal people understood how capitalism
| worked in practice, they'd revolt because all industries
| effectively become rackets.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| " It feels much more like the Soviet Union collapsed than the
| US won"
|
| That's probably true. I never understood the assertion that the
| US or Reagan "won" the Cold War. The US just persisted longer.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Wars, hot and cold, are _often_ won by one side experiencing
| political and /or economic collapse, taking them off the table.
|
| It's not a "this or that" thing. You win by being the last
| standing.
| zachmu wrote:
| I read a non-fiction book by Frank Abagnale (inspiration for
| Catch Me If You Can) about common forms of fraud, and it's
| remarkable how often people are caught embezzling because they do
| something dumb like buy a flashy car that attracts attention from
| coworkers. Embezzling in the pre-computer age was pretty easy to
| get away with if you would just avoid drawing attention to
| yourself, but people just can't help it.
| nkingsy wrote:
| psa that dude pretty much invented his life story out of whole
| cloth.
| zachmu wrote:
| It's kind of funny how willing everyone was to believe an
| admitted conman.
|
| The book I read of his was "The Art of the Steal", and it
| wasn't really about his personal history, more about his work
| as an anti-fraud consultant drawing from real-world cases.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138841.The_Art_of_the_St.
| ..
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The penalty for being wrong was none, and the story was
| quite entertaining. Why not hold it as true?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Tricking Steven Spielberg into directing a movie about you is
| the ultimate con.
| BjoernKW wrote:
| In case of a good story, I suppose Spielberg couldn't care
| less if that story is entirely based on facts or mere
| fiction (and a good story it is).
| knodi123 wrote:
| The true story behind The Wolf Of Wall Street was pretty
| exaggerated due to the author wanting to make a better drama,
| too.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| This is a surprisingly common way that spies get caught, and
| the FBI even includes "buying things they can't afford" in
| their list of ways to "spot a possible insider threat".
|
| https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/how-to-spot-a-possible-insi...
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| > non-fiction book by Frank Abagnale
|
| yea, as others have pointed out, non-fiction is not appropriate
| label for this book.
| zachmu wrote:
| Different book
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138841.The_Art_of_the_St.
| ..
| margalabargala wrote:
| Unless evidence to the contrary presents itself, it seems
| appropriate to assume that all books written by the conman
| known to present fiction as fact share similar
| relationships with the truth.
| gwd wrote:
| I half wonder if that's actually some part of their brain which
| actually wants to be caught.
| Jensson wrote:
| I think they just underestimate how much people investigate
| and think about strange things that doesn't add up.
| fnord77 wrote:
| So what happened to Veliotis?
|
| Articles as late as 1987 just list him as "a fugitive hiding in
| Athens", then nothing.
|
| Did he get away with it?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-29 23:01 UTC)