Williams, a former member of the Georgia House of Representatives who earned a $165,000 salary as the agency’s director, then paid for the cheaper saw using his credit card while wearing his forestry commission uniform, a cashier told police.
Williams, who was arrested when he returned to the store to speak to a manager, admitted to swapping the price tags, saying “he had done such things in the past and does it for the thrill.”
Donald [to Don Jr]: Oh I do so hope Rudy has the coronavirus. It makes all of us so much stronger and wiser. [Shouts.] Biden isn’t even coughing yet! He’s a total zero with his [spits]… MASKS. I have personal experience fighting the coronavirus. That firsthand experience, Joe Biden doesn’t have that.
Don Jr: Dad, I want a word with you. [Nervously, with his father still watching the screen.] You know how much better you’ve been lately… I mean, more … in touch! More grounded! The family really feels you’ve come back to us after… drifting from us a bit… [DT does not respond. Still watching screen.] But Dad, your behavior the last few days… It’s like you’re back in the … bad old days…
Donald: [Hand goes automatically to his hair. Scowls.] The nurses messed up my do. Son, am I still young and beautiful? Have my looks faded? Howard Stern – how long ago it seems! – told me I was the handsomest man he’d ever met. How much simpler life was then!
Don Jr: [Gazes with deep sorrow at his father.] I feel so damned sunk. Because this time you had me fooled. I really believed you were mentally sound. I really believed you had it licked. I can’t forgive you yet. I’d begun to hope… I’ve never known you to drown yourself in it as deep as this…
Just… read it. Just work your way through it. I promise it will bring a smile – and maybe even laughter! – to your face.
Excerpts:
‘Merchants Hospitality has filed an explosive lawsuit against former partner Adam Hochfelder, accusing him of running a Ponzi scheme, embezzling investor money and retaliating against his former associates after he was fired in June.
In a complaint filed in New York State Supreme Court last week, Merchants claims it went out on a limb to help Hochfelder get back on his feet after a two-year prison stint, only to catch him stealing from the firm and using its name and assets to defraud unsuspecting investors and partners…
Hochfelder went to prison in 2010 after pleading guilty to 15 counts of grand larceny and three counts of scheming to defraud his uncle, in-laws and other investors out of more than $18 million. He left prison and was hired by Merchants in 2012.
Now, eight years later, Merchants accuses Hochfelder of embezzling funds from its West 42nd Street hotel project — the site of a failed effort to run a high-priced Playboy Club in New York — and using his affiliation with the firm to run a $400,000 Ponzi scheme through his company email…
[Hochfelder] accused Merchants of fabricating the scheme by breaking into his computer and creating false documents…
Merchants brought Hochfelder on board during his prison stint to spearhead acquisitions and development for the firm…
In 2014, Merchant, the firm’s CEO, called hiring Hochfelder “one of the best decisions we ever made.” And in 2017, after allegations of sexual harassment against Hochfelder surfaced, [the CEO] defended Hochfelder, saying, “It’s easy for him to be a pinata because of his past. But I think everybody deserves a second chance.”…
Merchants claims it conducted an investigation into [one particular] embezzlement … and Hochfelder ultimately admitted to the scheme and begged his partners to let him repay the money, citing “his own psychological issues and problems with drugs,” according to the September lawsuit…
Hochfelder [allegedly] collected $125,000 for an investment in the Bryant Park Hotel, which Merchants does not own. The complaint also alleges that Hochfelder offered an interest in Merchants’ Z Hotel in Long Island City but had the investor wire $75,000 to an LLC owned by his wife.
On top of those accusations and the alleged $4 million payment withheld by Roche, Merchants says Hochfelder has left the firm with months of overdue car payments, traffic violations and an ongoing eviction proceeding at his Midtown apartment…’
[Israel’s] coronavirus czar… carved the country into red, yellow or green zones depending on their virus rates. He intended to enforce lockdowns in the hardest-hit places.
But his plan, which became known as the “traffic light plan,” turned into political dynamite: The red cities were found to be overwhelmingly ultra-Orthodox or Arab, attesting to the crowded conditions in which these communities live. Mr. Netanyahu, for whom the ultra-Orthodox parties are a crucial coalition partner, balked. We became the country with the highest rate of new coronavirus cases per capita in the world.
On Wednesday, it becomes official: The city’s viral hot spots will be locked down. Life can only go back to normal when these communities are able to bring their shockingly high infection rates (8 percent positivity in some neighborhoods) down; but this is unlikely. More likely are riots, and even more brazen (because now enraged) flouting of masking and distancing. As in Israel, struggling with the same catastrophe on a vaster scale, there’s nothing admirably tolerant about letting populations fail to educate themselves and their children in the germ theory of disease, or fail to grasp basic civic life and social responsibility.
How weird we are, my fellow Americans. We are witnessing the playing out of our version of Greek tragedy, the downfall of the hero, the revelation that one of our most gifted envied potent figures has been corrupted, has degenerated, has been brought low by hubris or some other fatal character flaw, leaving us to regard with pity and fear his appalling end.
Unlike Trump, however, the traditional tragic hero (Oedipus, Hamlet, Faustus, Kurtz, the Consul) starts off dramatically better than the rest of us – morally and intellectually superior. His fall is thus from a very high height, and this is the horror and the pity of it – that even the very best among us will be shot down by the gods, or by some long-latent intrinsic defect. Although the hero soars above the rest of us, his eventual all-too-human fall instructs us in (and, Aristotle argues, helps reconcile us to) the limitations of our human nature, and the universal extinction that awaits us all, high and low.
The model of the tragic reversal, the hero’s sudden turn from high to low, from glory to catastrophe, doesn’t fit the president, who, as many have noted, has from the start played out a strikingly low-life narrative. This American tragic hero seems simply to have brazenly gotten away with a lot of things, and now time and circumstance have caught up with him. No one watching his effort, during the debate with Biden, also to brazen that event out, can have missed the desperation of a man coming to the bottom of his bag of tricks.
And, well, I guess we can reference tragic irony, of a sort. As Maureen Dowd’s comment in my headline suggests, we certainly have here that old dramatic chestnut whereby the thing the hero dreads the most – in this case, losing – over-abundantly, maximally painfully, with the whole world watching, comes to pass.
