A Rolex that once belonged to Paul Newman sold for $17.8 million last month, the most expensive watch ever sold at auction. The name of the winner of the duelling phone bids is unknown at this time, but we can be reasonably sure that it wasn’t Harvey Weinstein. Not because he’s had a lot on his plate lately, but because it was probably a bit out of his price range.
Harvey Weinstein is an extremely wealthy and powerful man, but there are circles in which he’s considered small change. In a country with 540 billionaires, Weinstein has an estimated net worth of a mere $300 million. Given that he’s only spent a couple million on political influence since the turn of the century, it seems unlikely that he’d fork out 17.8 from his estate for a timepiece. Odds are on the other end of that phone bidding line was someone with some real money.
Weinstein is not one of the wealthiest men in his country, but even he could afford to hire his own personal army of ex-Mossad intelligence veterans to conduct espionage and psyops to silence his rape victims.
The New Yorker has published a nauseatingly disturbing article titled “Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies”, detailing how the Hollywood exec used firms like Kroll and Black Cube to intimidate, spy on, deceive, nullify, and gather information on women who might come forward with accusations of sexual assault and the journalists who interacted with them. In addition to undercover operations wherein agents had covertly recorded conversations with actresses and journos under false identities, the Israeli intelligence firm Black Cube provided “intelligence analysts, linguists, and ‘Avatar Operators’ specifically hired to create fake identities on social media, as well as ‘operations experts with extensive experience in social engineering,’ ” TheNew Yorker reports.
The price tag on this whole operation? The final invoice totaled $600,000. Well within the affordability range of a man like Weinstein, and even considerably less wealthy millionaires if they really needed such services.
I have a hard time imagining anything more evil than a powerful Hollywood elitist hiring out ex-Mossad agents to silence his rape victims. It’s the kind of darkness that makes you reconsider your most fundamental beliefs about what humans are and what we’re doing here. As awful as this particular case is, though, what I find far more disturbing is its broader implications.
Wanna be seriously creeped out for a minute? Check out Black Cube’s website. This is their main page, the one they present to people when you search for them on Google. The dark colors, the men in black suits looming over a city, all while advertising how they can “map all potential sources of interest by trawling the deep web and harvesting information from typically inaccessible areas of the Internet such as the Dark Net” and “extract valuable information from limited access sources, both in virtual and physical environments.”
Could they be more “Hey rich people! We’ll do pretty much any evil thing you want if the price is right”?
This is a standard, private service that you can hire if you have enough money. They’ll work through your lawyer’s office, so that everything they do is legally protected by attorney-client privilege. You get a personal army of thugs and manipulators to hamstring, bully, silence, surveille or coerce anybody you want, trained by one of the most depraved intelligence agencies on the planet. If you can afford it.
It’s stupid to think that Kroll and Black Cube are the only ones trying to offer the wealthy these services, and it’s stupid to think that Weinstein is the only rich asshole using such services to cover up his personal evils. Weinstein got caught because he happens to have a fetish for women of means, who became wealthy themselves and who can with enough effort get their voices heard. Imagine crossing a wealthy person and not having such means at your disposal. This has doubtless happened to countless people.
Harvey Weinstein is not one of the richest men in America. Imagine the kind of services whoever bought Paul Newman’s watch could afford? What kind of private services are available to someone who has $6 million to throw at someone who’s inconveniencing them? Or $60 million? Or $600 million? You live in a country where if you cross someone who has enough money, anything could happen to you.
My conservative followers bitch about “class warfare” when I speak about how the billionaire class rules their country in exactly the same way a king rules a kingdom, but the war is already happening, brothers — I didn’t start it. The donor class has bought up the US federal government to the point where non-wealthy Americans have functionally zero influence over its policies or behavior, and if they abuse that immense power it turns out that they’re not only protected by the judicial system, but they have their own private extrajudicial army as well!
Class warfare has been happening for generations, and ordinary people are only just now waking up to that fact. It’s like someone’s been punching us in the face for years, and we’re only just beginning to realize “Hey wait a minute, this guy’s not my friend! I’m in a fight! I’d better hit back or he’ll kill me!”
I’m not advocating violence here, but I’m also not advocating allowing ourselves to be intimidated by these revelations into sitting down and shutting up. The Weinstein case has showed us exactly how to beat these bastards: enough women coming forward at once made his old tactics for silencing them ineffective. If enough people decide not to let a few hundred plutocrats rule their world anymore, we can shrug them off like a heavy coat on a warm day just by crippling the plutocracy’s propaganda machine and waking mainstream America up to their manipulations. They cannot rule without their consent-manufacturer. We can beat them without firing a shot.
Six hundred thousand. That’s not a lot of money to have your own Mossad-trained psyops and espionage team at your disposal. Most of Silicon Valley could find that sort of dinero [and deduct it from their taxes!] if they were really motivated. And right now, it’s all legal. There’s no suggestion that anyone will go to jail for acting as Weinstein’s goon squad. There is no penalty for Weinstein for using these agents to continue stalking and psychologically abusing his victims long after his initial assaults were over. No heads will roll for using tacit intimidation and harassment as a means to silence victims and the journalists who are trying to tell their story.
It’s exactly the same with the recently released Paradise Papers. There’ll be public outcry from some of the things revealed there, but it’s unlikely that many will suffer meaningful legal repercussions for the ways they hid their money to prevent any of it from going toward helping society. That’s the real problem here: corruption and economic injustice are not illegal. Improprietous? Maybe. Illegal, no.
Not yet, anyway. Let’s change that.
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APPENDIX
The Scumbag Thickens
Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies
Read below the New Yorker’s Vivid Exposé of Weinstein’s Web of Spies and Falsifications. And keep in mind that Weinstein, despite his obnoxiousness is small potatoes compared to the real rich, a guy like Jeff Bezos, for example ($79bn) whose fortunes are in the tens of billions if not trillions. [Excerpt]
Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies
The film executive hired private investigators, including ex-Mossad agents, to track actresses and journalists.
Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her. One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan. The same operative, using a different false identity and implying that she had an allegation against Weinstein, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were talking to the press. In other cases, journalists directed by Weinstein or the private investigators interviewed women and reported back the details.
The explicit goal of the investigations, laid out in one contract with Black Cube, signed in July, was to stop the publication of the abuse allegations against Weinstein that eventually emerged in the New York Times and The New Yorker. Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies “target,” or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focussed on their personal or sexual histories. Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally. He also enlisted former employees from his film enterprises to join in the effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to some sources who received them, felt intimidating.
In some cases, the investigative effort was run through Weinstein’s lawyers, including David Boies, a celebrated attorney who represented Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential-election dispute and argued for marriage equality before the U.S. Supreme Court. Boies personally signed the contract directing Black Cube to attempt to uncover information that would stop the publication of a Timesstory about Weinstein’s abuses, while his firm was also representing the Times, including in a libel case.
Boies confirmed that his firm contracted with and paid two of the agencies and that investigators from one of them sent him reports, which were then passed on to Weinstein. He said that he did not select the firms or direct the investigators’ work. He also denied that the work regarding the Times story represented a conflict of interest. Boies said that his firm’s involvement with the investigators was a mistake. “We should not have been contracting with and paying investigators that we did not select and direct,” he told me. “At the time, it seemed a reasonable accommodation for a client, but it was not thought through, and that was my mistake. It was a mistake at the time.”
Techniques like the ones used by the agencies on Weinstein’s behalf are almost always kept secret, and, because such relationships are often run through law firms, the investigations are theoretically protected by attorney-client privilege, which could prevent them from being disclosed in court. The documents and sources reveal the tools and tactics available to powerful individuals to suppress negative stories and, in some cases, forestall criminal investigations.
In a statement, Weinstein’s spokesperson, Sallie Hofmeister, said, “It is a fiction to suggest that any individuals were targeted or suppressed at any time.”
In May, 2017, McGowan received an e-mail from a literary agency introducing her to a woman who identified herself as Diana Filip, the deputy head of sustainable and responsible investments at Reuben Capital Partners, a London-based wealth-management firm. Filip told McGowan that she was launching an initiative to combat discrimination against women in the workplace, and asked McGowan, a vocal women’s-rights advocate, to speak at a gala kickoff event later that year. Filip offered McGowan a fee of sixty thousand dollars. “I understand that we have a lot in common,” Filip wrote to McGowan before their first meeting, in May, at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. Filip had a U.K. cell-phone number, and she spoke with what McGowan took to be a German accent. Over the following months, the two women met at least three more times at hotel bars in Los Angeles and New York and other locations. “I took her to the Venice boardwalk and we had ice cream while we strolled,” McGowan told me, adding that Filip was “very kind.” The two talked at length about issues relating to women’s empowerment. Filip also repeatedly told McGowan that she wanted to make a significant investment in McGowan’s production company.
Filip was persistent. In one e-mail, she suggested meeting in Los Angeles and then, when McGowan said she would be in New York, Filip said she could meet there just as easily. She also began pressing McGowan for information. In a conversation in July, McGowan revealed to Filip that she had spoken to me as part of my reporting on Weinstein. A week later, I received an e-mail from Filip asking for a meeting and suggesting that I join her campaign to endprofessional discrimination against women. “I am very impressed with your work as a male advocate for gender equality, and believe that you would make an invaluable addition to our activities,” she wrote, using her wealth-management firm’s e-mail address. Unsure of who she was, I did not respond.
Filip continued to meet with McGowan. In one meeting in September, Filip was joined by another Black Cube operative, who used the name Paul and claimed to be a colleague at Reuben Capital Partners. The goal, according to two sources with knowledge of the effort, was to pass McGowan to another operative to extract more information. On October 10th, the day The New Yorker published my story about Weinstein, Filip reached out to McGowan in an e-mail. “Hi Love,” she wrote. “How are you feeling? . . . Just wanted to tell you how brave I think you are.” She signed off with an “xx.” Filip e-mailed McGowan as recently as October 23rd.
In fact, “Diana Filip” was an alias for a former officer in the Israeli Defense Forces who originally hailed from Eastern Europe and was working for Black Cube, according to three individuals with knowledge of the situation. When I sent McGowan photos of the Black Cube agent, she recognized her instantly. “Oh my God,” she wrote back. “Reuben Capital. Diana Filip. No fucking way.”
Ben Wallace, a reporter at New York who was pursuing a story on Weinstein, said that the same woman met with him twice last fall. She identified herself only as Anna and suggested that she had an allegation against Weinstein. When I presented Wallace with the same photographs of Black Cube’s undercover operative, Wallace recalled her vividly. “That’s her,” he said. Like McGowan, Wallace said that the woman had what he assumed to be a German accent, as well as a U.K. cell-phone number. Wallace told me that Anna first contacted him on October 28, 2016, when he had been working on the Weinstein story for about a month and a half. Anna declined to disclose who had given her Wallace’s information. Over the course of the two meetings, Wallace grew increasingly suspicious of her motives. Anna seemed to be pushing him for information, he recalled, “about the status and scope of my inquiry, and about who I might be talking to, without giving me any meaningful help or information.” During their second meeting, Anna requested that they sit close together, leading Wallace to suspect that she might be recording the exchange. When she recounted her experiences with Weinstein, Wallace said, “it seemed like soap-opera acting.” Wallace wasn’t the only journalist the woman contacted. In addition to her e-mails to me, Filip also e-mailed Jodi Kantor, of the Times, according to sources involved in the effort.
The U.K. cell-phone numbers that Filip provided to Wallace and McGowan have been disconnected. Calls to Reuben Capital Partners’ number in London went unanswered. As recently as Friday, the firm had a bare-bones Web site, with stock photos and generic text passages about asset management and an initiative called Women in Focus. The site, which has now been taken down, listed an address near Piccadilly Circus, operated by a company specializing in shared office space. That company said that it had never heard of Reuben Capital Partners. Two sources with knowledge of Weinstein’s work with Black Cube said that the firm creates fictional companies to provide cover for its operatives, and that Filip’s firm was one of them.
Black Cube declined to comment on the specifics of any work it did for Weinstein. The agency said in a statement, “It is Black Cube’s policy to never discuss its clients with any third party, and to never confirm or deny any speculation made with regard to the company’s work. Black Cube supports the work of many leading law firms around the world, especially in the US, gathering evidence for complex legal processes, involving commercial disputes, among them uncovering negative campaigns. . . . It should be highlighted that Black Cube applies high moral standards to its work, and operates in full compliance with the law of any jurisdiction in which it operates—strictly following the guidance and legal opinions provided by leading law firms from around the world.” The contract with the firm also specified that all of its work would be obtained “by legal means and in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.”
Last fall, Weinstein began mentioning Black Cube by name in conversations with his associates and attorneys. The agency had made a name for itself digging up information for companies in Israel, Europe, and the U.S. that led to successful legal judgments against business rivals. But the firm has also faced legal questions about its employees’ use of fake identities and other tactics. Last year, two of its investigators were arrested in Romania on hacking charges. In the end, the company reached an agreement with the Romanian authorities, under which the operatives admitted to hacking and were released. Two sources familiar with the agency defended its decision to work for Weinstein, saying that they originally believed that the assignment focussed on his business rivals. But even the earliest lists of names that Weinstein provided to Black Cube included actresses and journalists.
READ THE REST HERE
Parting shot—a word from the editors
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