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:
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Sometimes there is inertia from fooling someone credible and influential. Once you have them you sail through everyone else. If the person later discovered your fraud they aren't likely to expose it because it would ruin their credibility.
I have seen banks get taken by people and just sweep shit under the rug.
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.
20 year span, $50 million stolen in most brazen way possible. Buying expensive horses and giving Hermes bags as gifts on small town comptroller salary, nobody questioned it.
You can still spend the money. But you don't need to show off in front of the people you are stealing the money from.
There are a bunch of accounting firms, law firms, and consulting agencies that don't allow their employees to wear super expensive clothing, jewelry or drive luxury cars in front of their clients. And they aren't even doing anything illegal.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is mention in one of the articles he received "limited immunity" for providing evidence, which could have helped him avoid a more aggressive effort to get him. Or maybe they just didn't think the spectacle that would have been his trial was in anyones best interest.
Or if you want to get more conspiratorial, he could have been hanging onto these as a negotiating tool:
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.
> The less discretion the bureaucrat has, the harder it is for them to be corrupt.
This is what pisses me off about the SF planning commission. They shouldn't get to make case-by-case decisions about what building projects go through. This should be handled by career employees that consult a checklist of items that need to be completed, and codes that need to be followed, and when all those boxes are checked, that's what approval looks like.
It's not even relevant whether the planning commission is corrupt or not. The fact that they get to make arbitrary value judgments is a problem.
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.
>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.
> 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.
Looking at your statements from a Hungarian perspective, I think you are wrong
1. The USSR always discriminated non Russian speakers.
2. Collectivisation and military occupation was used as a large scale wealth transfer. In addition forced reeducation camps and population swaps were used to put Russian observers into positions where they were first amongst equals
Russian imperialism has always been the core of the Soviet union.
When people rised up against Russian occupation they got slaughtered in Hungary in 1956 and later in 1968 with the Prague Spring Russian oppression continued
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.
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.
"enforce political control and nationalistic tendencies of ethnic groups"?
This literally means stop nationalist secession movements. Literally no country on earth basically lets their citizens secede dude. Russians were ALSO the target of such programs.
It's like saying state atheism is uniquely Islamophobic or uniquely anti christian or uniquely antisemitic.
I'm not saying it's not repression. It totally is, but it's not racist.
I can't speak on corruption in the USSR. I'm just pointing out corruption in our own history that we're often blind to because we don't think of it as corruption, even though the examples above do constitute an unnatural OR unfair warping of the natural flow of resources/influence/capital.
> There is a persistent myth that Communist Russia was an egalitarian paradise
And that hasn't changed to this day. There are lots of migrants from former Soviet republics in central Asia that come to Russia for work and life, and they experience bigotry and discrimination.
The recent theater shooting & fire in Moscow has inflamed tensions, as many people blame Tajiks for the violence, and take it out on any random Tajik in the city. Similar to the anti-Arab racism and violence in the US post-9/11.
In 2021 a Tajik woman represented Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest, and many Russians were angry about this "not a real Russian" representing them. Some of the online discourse about it (according to my Russian-speaking friends) was truly disgusting.
Russia is no better than the US (and many other ethnically-diverse countries) on this metric.
The US government committed explicit genocide against Native Americans (including Hawaiians), and many of the actions undertaken by the federal and state governments, or allowed to be undertaken by private citizens, against black and Asian Americans fall under the definition of genocide, including, but not limited to: forced internment during WWII, forced sterilization, and the various acts of terror and massacre undertaken by white supremacist organizations since the end of the Civil War. Additionally, the forced, systematic destruction and relocation of black (and, to a lesser extent, Latino, Asian, and Jewish) communities, which has been variously characterized as "urban renewal" and "gentrification", may not rise to the level of genocide, but it certainly carries the scent of it. So does the policy of mass incarceration.
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?
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
> “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.
Thank you for the history of the term "concentration camp"; I'd always wondered where that came from. I got that they "concentrated" groups of people in smaller locations, but it always seemed weird to me to focus on that aspect. Makes a lot more sense considering the Boer's & native African's (previous) way of life.
Regardless, though, I feel like you aren't really arguing the salient question anymore: did Japanese internment during WWII constitute genocide? As I understand the term -- mass murder and extinction of an ethnic or cultural group -- no, Japanese internment was absolutely not genocide. Jewish (and other) internment in Europe during WWII absolutely was, though, given the intent (and unfortunate amount of success) at killing large numbers of the people imprisoned.
Words have meanings, and those meanings matter. Otherwise we're just flinging around emotional charge without talking about anything real.
> Likewise it's really funny to say that GULAGs were genocidal while US internment wasn't
I believe you're the first person to bring up gulags, so that's a bit of a straw man.
The person you replied to upthread acknowledged (a bit late for my taste, but acknowledged) that what the US did to native peoples in the 1800s was genocide, so I'm not sure why you're still arguing that point. I don't think you can make a case that the Mexican Repatriation was genocide, as this was about forced migration, not murder and extermination. (The atrocities around Native Americans were also partially about forced migration -- which was more of an excuse than a goal -- but the end result was indeed genocide.)
Again, all of these things are bad! But (as another poster said), just because something is bad and is targeted at a particular ethnic group, that doesn't mean it's genocide.
Your understanding of what constitutes genocide is mistaken. It's not just murder. Any widespread or systematic attempt to remove an ethnic group from existence in a particular region counts, even if it's not successful or doesn't result in massive loss of life, if the intent is to disrupt that ethnic group's ability to sustain itself. Forced removal falls under this, as does ethnic reeducation. Japanese internment during WWII was arguably a genocidal act because its character as an act of ethnic cleansing (even if temporary, in hindsight) is often a first step to outright extermination. Thankfully, the war went well for America, and we felt no need to succumb to dangerous impulses; however, should Midway or other engagements have not gone well, or had the war been drawn out, putting a strain on resources, you would have seen starvation rates rise in the camps, at the very least.
You're making distinctions in service of, "Well, we weren't THAT bad," but generally, I would think the nominal international champion of freedom and justice would want to stay away from even the whiff of such things.
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
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...
It's impossible to say definitely, something that's true for quite a lot of topics, but that doesn't mean there's nothing useful to be said. E.g., Transparency International's corruption index.
Is there any actual evidence that Putin is actively corrupt on the level of say Jared Kushner or Hunter Biden (and their father figures), or is it just kinda an a priori thing so we can pat ourselves on the back?
Respectfully, this is like me asking about Obama and you replying with a Dinesh D'Souza hitjob. That video has been thoroughly debunked as a baseless conspiracy theory.
Arkady Rotenberg and others have claimed current or prior ownership of the property. It really is just a conspiracy theory produced by rabidly anti-Putin media operatives like Navalny -- the exact same playbook as Dinesh D'Souza or "Project Veritas".
The original allegation was made by Sergei Kolesnikov, not Navalny. Reuters traced the money which was used to build Putin's Palace. Any of Putin's associates can claim ownership in order to take the heat off of him, but it is his to use as he sees fit.
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.
I think we're sorta talking about a couple different (but related) things. One "feature" of many corrupt oligarchies that US doesn't have (yet?) is the totalitarian or authoritarian nature of the executive government, which leads to persecution of critics of the system and especially of critics of the oligarchs.
While I'm not comfortable with the wealth concentration in the US, at least people aren't getting rounded up and "disappeared" when they talk about it.
Corrupt oligarchy is a bit redundant in this context. America is an effective oligarchy, and that in itself is a corruption since it’s a nominal democracy. And that’s all that it takes to be an (corrupt) oligarchy in this context.
As to the grand parent: that’s just whining about relative privation.
> While I'm not comfortable with the wealth concentration in the US, at least people aren't getting rounded up and "disappeared" when they talk about it.
All that reveals is that "talking about it" doesn't threaten the system, which isn't something to be proud of. Instead of destroying dissent, it is hushed, polarized, deflected, diluted. I guess polite totalitarianism is better than impolite totalitarianism? It's certainly more durable.
> 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.
Don't be so sure. China's military appears to be somewhat hollowed out by corruption. China doesn't have the military experience it would take to invade Taiwan. Taiwan will resist being invaded.
A Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan could end catastrophically for China.
Embarrassingly, not catastrophically. US proved they will do everything in their power to not risk even the slightest provocation of weak russia (because nukes). Even the prepared response to russia nuking Ukraine was supposed to be sinking of Black Sea Fleet - something Ukrainians managed on their own in ~70% by now despite not having operational navy of their own. Do you really think there will be US response to full on Chinese invasion? I can already predict strongly worded letters and condemnation. US doesnt even have nor want to have a base there.
I doubt that's the case. The countries of the world were much less interdependent after WWII than they are today. The collapse of the US will take much of the rest of the developed world with it -- including China.
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.
> It feels much more like the Soviet Union collapsed than the US won.
I mean, that's literally what happened. The USSR collapsed. I'm sure the US had some part in that, but I don't think it was a major part. The US "winning" the Cold War was just spin.
But still, being the last one standing is indeed a certain kind of winning.
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.
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.
It doesn't matter who erected the barrier, the end result is that the USSR was not able to run successful influence campaigns or inject money into the US politics on the scale Russia is doing today.
USSR was an oligarchy before. Now it is a dictatorship, so operations have a single decision maker. Also, Putin is highly interested in ops which extend his influence and his ability to steal.
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.
It's unclear what happened to him. After the 80s it seems the US decided not pursue him [1] and per another comment it seems he may have passed in 1999. I haven't found much else besides a court case involving his son and wife in 1998. Part of why I posted this was hoping I might peak the interest of someone with more sleuthing skills than I.
[1] There was mention in one article from the 80s that he may have been granted a limited immunity as part of providing evidence, which may have helped him avoid a more aggressive effort to have him returned.
