Thread by @soychicka

The following is totally circumstantial - someone in NYC has to track down the historical data to confirm.

If it IS correct, though today's criminal complaint re: money laundering/prostitution just got WAY more interesting:
justice.gov/usao-sdny/pres…

I was curious, so I looked up VIP Escorts, found the owner and at least 100 more domains (so far)...

MANY escort sites, including VIPEscorts, date back to 1998.

It doesn't sound like a domain squatter, it sounds more like a pre-established network.

domainbigdata.com/nj/5gRzqPH_G4J…

So I started looking up the other VIP affiliate sites, and find this New York Magazine ad for Prestige Escorts, located at 175 5th Ave.

I've only been to NYC twice, but the addy sounded familiar, for some reason.... so I look it up...

And NO, it's not a Trump building.

But you know it.

175 5th Ave, between 5th Ave, Broadway, E 22nd and E23rd St: that's the Flatiron Building.

The Flatiron building was designed in 1901 by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, also responsible for the "White City" of the 1893 Worlds' Fair, later Chicago's boulevards in the Plan of Chicago, and Washington DC's McMillan Plan (the last time the swamp was actually drained).

Let's skip ahead to post WWII - the building has stood about 50 years, through one defaulted mortgage, and is now owned by one Harry Helmsley (yes, husband of "Only Little People pay taxes" Leona Helmsley, and client of Roy Cohn ).

So. Helmsely buys the building, does some superficial renovations, and about 10 years later, subsidiaries of the Macmillan group start moving in, until they totally took over the entire building by 2004

Macmillan is now owned by some German company, but it wasn't in the 80s...

Actually, it was the acquisition of that company that occupied the Flatiron building in the late 1980s brought about the "untimely demise" of one of most ubiquitous, most ruthless tycoons known to the post-war generation.

His name: Robert Maxwell.

Maxwell had been in scientific publishing since the early 1950s, when he founded Pergamon Press, and launched the pay-to-publish-and-read model that plagues the scientific community until this day (see the death of Aaron Swartz).
vault.fbi.gov/robert-maxwell

And while he diversified his empire, owning tabloids and daily newspapers, logistics**, software "distribution"***, cable networks, being elected to Parliament,

* and manufacturing political scandals
** arms trafficking
***search "PROMIS" & "inslaw affair"

But around 1988, 4 years after those ads for Prestige Escorts located at the Flatiron building, Maxwell's obsession with obtaining Macmillan drove him to near bankruptcy, which he temporarily stayed by stealing from the pension funds of his companies...

until his death in 1991, when everything came crashing down after he disappeared from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine in the middle of the night off the Canary Islands, his bloated corpse found floating in the water half a day later, with no clear cause of death.

And that's where things get really interesting.

Start with the pervious owner of this yacht - Emad Khashoggi: cousin of journalist Jamal Khashoggi ( given a Bone Saw funeral courtesy of Saudi Prince Salman) & Dodi Fayed (met his end after chased by paparazzi with Princess Di),

and nephew of Iran-Contra-linked arms trafficker Adnan Khashoggi (who sold his yacht to Trump- "Trump Princess").

Kinda weird that both men bought brand new yachts from relatives of a known arms trafficker at the same time the Iran Contra trial wraps, no?

Anyway, to the other really interesting factoid:
Trump had his "Princess."

Maxwell had his Lady Ghislaine.

As in Ghislaine Maxwell.
His daughter.

Soon to be known as girlfriend and top 'recruiter' for one Jeffrey Epstein.

== please hold as I pause for a brief cocktail identification and intermittent submission so I don't lose work to any critters jumping on the keyboard. ==

Update: I went with a dirty gin martini, about 7:1 g:v, with light splash of kalamata olive grunge instead of my usual 1/3-jar of green olive brine ( I usually call that "Tenderloin Style" - SF, you know what I mean.)

Lightly briny, quite apropos for discussing yachts.

<< The aroma seems to be quite appealing to the nearby furballs, though, so I'll be finishing it before finishing up here. >>

oops. too much gin and not enough brine in that martini...

rather than run the risk of being less-than-precise, I'll stick to shitfaceposting for the evening and finish up in the morrow.

(not really drunk, just need to be spot-on for this).

that said, I'm going to go out on a limb here tonight and say this:

We may have just seen the first charges to originate from the investigation of Ghislaine Maxwell - dropped while Barr is too busy trying to keep Roger Stone quiet to notice in time to stop it.

It's been a long time coming for those two, along with the rest of their friends.

Because anywhere Miss Maxwell goes, Bill Barr is sure to follow.

p.s. while I'm less guarded, the reason I've been able to synthesize all this: it's been my full-time occupation for the past 3+ years.

Unfortunately, when you piss off corrupt people... it doesn't bring a paycheck.

If you wanna chip in... 💜
patreon.com/soychicka