Prostitution

Leonard Glenn Francis pleaded guilty in 2015 to bribing military officials so his company could overcharge the U.S. Navy for servicing ships.

A Malaysian defense contractor nicknamed “Fat Leonard” who orchestrated one of the largest bribery scandals in U.S. military history has been arrested in Venezuela after fleeing before his sentencing, authorities said Wednesday.

U.S. Marshals Service via AP

The international manhunt for Leonard Glenn Francis ended with his arrest by Venezuelan authorities Tuesday morning at the Caracas airport as he was about to board an airplane for another country, the U.S. Marshals Service said.

Francis had traveled to Venezuela from Mexico with a stopover in Cuba, Interpol Venezuela Director General Carlos Garate Rondon said in a statement posted on Instagram. Francis was headed to Russia and was arrested at the main international airport in Caracas, the agency said.

The arrest came on the eve of his scheduled sentencing in a federal court in California for a bribery scheme that lasted more than a decade and involved dozens of U.S. Navy officers.

There was no immediate word on when he might be extradited to the United States.

At the sentencing hearing Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Janis Sammartino announced to the court that Francis was in custody in Venezuela and that a “no bail arrest warrant” had been issued.

“This turn of events raises several issues, and obviously will have an impact on other cases,” she said. A sentencing hearing for four Navy officers who went to trial in the case and were found guilty is set for October.

Prosecutors asked the court to note that Francis failed to appear at his sentencing hearing as ordered, while defense attorneys notified the court that they would be filing a motion severing their ties with Francis due to an “irreparable break down of the attorney-client relationship.”

Sammartino set a Dec. 14 status hearing for Francis with the caveat that all parties could meet sooner depending on how events unfold.

“I believe that’s all we can accomplish this morning,” Sammartino said.

The U.S. government faces an uphill challenge returning the fugitive back to American soil. The U.S. government doesn’t recognize Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government, has no embassy in the country and has imposed crushing sanctions on the country that has further embittered relations. Law enforcement cooperation between the two countries is rare.

Francis was under home arrest in San Diego when he cut off his GPS ankle bracelet and escaped on Sept. 4. Ten U.S. agencies searched for Francis and authorities issued a $40,000 reward for his arrest.

U.S. authorities also issued a red notice, which asks law enforcement worldwide to provisionally arrest someone with the possibility of extradition. Malaysia and Singapore both have extradition agreements with the United States.

Francis pleaded guilty in 2015 to offering prostitution services, luxury hotels, cigars, gourmet meals and more than $500,000 in bribes to Navy officials and others to help his Singapore-based ship servicing company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia Ltd. or GDMA. Prosecutors said the company overcharged the Navy by at least $35 million for servicing ships, many of which were routed to ports he controlled in the Pacific.

Francis had been allowed to remain in home confinement to receive medical care while he cooperated with the prosecution. With his help, prosecutors secured convictions of 33 of 34 defendants, including more than two dozen Navy officers.

Sammartino had feared Francis would run when she denied a request four years ago to allow him to be under house arrest without around-the-clock security guards.

The judge repeatedly maintained that security guards must be on site for Francis to be on house arrest, despite his poor health.

According to a transcript of a closed-door hearing in February 2018, which was unsealed in January, Sammartino expressed concern that her name would come up if Francis escaped and ended up back in Malaysia if anyone asked “who let somebody do this without security.”

She raised similar concerns in a Dec. 17, 2020, after receiving a report that the home was left without anyone guarding it for nearly three hours, according to the court transcript. The guard was on a lunch break, and Francis apologized to the judge for the mishap.

Officials found no security guards when they arrived at Francis’ home in a tony San Diego neighborhood some seven hours after he removed the ankle monitor, according to Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marsha, Omar Castillo. The device, believed to have been removed with heavy scissors, was found in the home.

Castillo said someone had called the San Diego police department, which sent officers to the home on the afternoon of Sept. 4. Officers found the home empty and contacted U.S. Pre-Trial Services, the federal agency in charge of his confinement, which then contacted the U.S. Marshals Service.

Neighbors reported seeing U-Haul trucks coming and going from the home one or two days before the escape, Castillo said.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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At first Mr. DeRosa didn’t take Mr. Epstein’s command seriously. But Mr. Epstein kept calling, as did members of his staff, asking if he’d made any progress. Mr. DeRosa got to work tracking down a cello.

Like many professional musicians, Mr. DeRosa was wired into the small world of rare string instruments, a few of which command prices as high as $20 million. His own cello, made by the Italian master Domenico Montagnana in 1739, is considered one of the world’s finest and is likely worth millions of dollars. Mr. DeRosa assured Mr. Epstein he wouldn’t have to spend that much.

Soon after, Mr. DeRosa was visiting his mother in Los Angeles when he learned of a cello being sold there by a musician who recorded soundtracks for Hollywood studios. (Before that, the cello had been played by a member of the Indianapolis symphony orchestra.)

While not a Stradivarius or a Montagnana, this cello had a distinguished pedigree, and was manufactured by Ettore Soffritti, who worked in the string instrument center of Ferrara, Italy, from the late 1800s until his death in 1928. Benning Violins, the Los Angeles dealer, described the cello’s sound as “rich and powerful” and said the instrument was “suitable for the finest of cellists.”

Mr. DeRosa tried the cello. He was smitten. He said he considered it “one of the greatest modern cellos in existence.” (By “modern” he meant any produced after the Italian Renaissance.) With an asking price of $185,000, he also considered it a bargain.

Mr. Epstein seemed pleased when Mr. DeRosa told him he’d found something. He said the cello’s intended recipient — a young Israeli man named Yoed Nir — had to test the instrument first. Mr. DeRosa knew nearly every up-and-coming cellist, but he had never heard of Mr. Nir.

Mr. DeRosa had the cello on a trial basis, and Mr. Nir tested the instrument on a visit to Mr. DeRosa’s mother’s house in Los Angeles. Mr. Nir, who was about 30 years old and had dark, shoulder-length hair, which he tossed theatrically while playing, played some of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites. He had clearly had musical training (he was a graduate of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance), but Mr. DeRosa considered his playing unexceptional by his exacting standards. He could think of many young cellists more deserving of such an instrument. “I thought it incredibly odd that Jeffrey had chosen this guy,” Mr. DeRosa recalled.

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By the time Melinda French Gates decided to end her 27-year marriage, her husband was known globally as a software pioneer, a billionaire and a leading philanthropist.

But in some circles, Bill Gates had also developed a reputation for questionable conduct in work-related settings. That is attracting new scrutiny amid the breakup of one of the world’s richest, most powerful couples.

In 2018, Ms. French Gates wasn’t satisfied with her husband’s handling of a previously undisclosed sexual harassment claim against his longtime money manager, according to two people familiar with the matter. After Mr. Gates moved to settle the matter confidentially, Ms. French Gates insisted on an outside investigation. The money manager, Michael Larson, remains in his job.

On at least a few occasions, Mr. Gates pursued women who worked for him at Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, according to people with direct knowledge of his overtures. In meetings at the foundation, he was at times dismissive toward his wife, witnesses said.

public view, Ms. French Gates was unhappy. She hired divorce lawyers, setting in motion a process that culminated this month with the announcement that their marriage was ending.

a public appearance in 2016.

Long after they married in 1994, Mr. Gates would on occasion pursue women in the office.

In 2006, for example, he attended a presentation by a female Microsoft employee. Mr. Gates, who at the time was the company’s chairman, left the meeting and immediately emailed the woman to ask her out to dinner, according to two people familiar with the exchange.

“If this makes you uncomfortable, pretend it never happened,” Mr. Gates wrote in an email, according to a person who read it to The New York Times.

SEOUL — A judge in South Korea ruled on Wednesday that Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery by Japan during World War II cannot seek compensation from the Japanese government in a South Korean court, a decision that angered survivors and contradicted an earlier ruling in January.

In the earlier verdict, the presiding judge ordered the Japanese government to pay 100 million won ($89,400) each to 12 former Korean sex slaves, known as “comfort women.”

The two different decisions by two different judges in the Seoul Central District Court complicated the survivors’ decades-long effort to hold the Japanese government legally accountable for wartime sexual slavery. The two rulings also showed that the South Korean judiciary was divided over Japan’s claim that international law shielded it from lawsuits in foreign courts.

In January, the South Korean judge ruled that the Japanese government should be subject to Korean jurisdiction because the experience of Korean sex slaves involved “anti-humanity acts systematically planned and perpetrated by the Japanese Empire.” For such acts, Japan cannot claim exemption from a lawsuit in South Korea based on state sovereignty, he said.

2015 agreement, which South Korea and Japan called “final and irreversible,” permanently settled the long-running dispute over comfort women. Previously, in a 1993 statement, Japan issued a formal apology for the practice.

On Wednesday, a different South Korean judge, Min Seong-cheol, sided with Japan and threw out the lawsuit filed by a separate group of former sex slaves. If courts start making exceptions to the principle of national sovereignty, “diplomatic clashes become inevitable,” the judge said in his ruling. Mr. Min also cited the 2015 agreement, under which Japan acknowledged responsibility for its actions, apologized anew to the women and set up an $8.3 million fund to help provide old-age care for survivors.

Some of the surviving women have accepted payments from the 2015 fund. Others rejected the agreement, saying that it failed to specify Japan’s “legal” responsibility or to provide official reparations. The lawsuit thrown out on Wednesday was filed in 2016 by 20 plaintiffs, including 11 former sex slaves. Only four of the 11 are still alive, and all of them are in their 80s or 90s.

Neither the ruling in January nor the one on Wednesday is the final say on the matter. The plaintiffs in the second lawsuit said they would seek the opinion of higher courts by appealing Wednesday’s decision.

Support for the prostitutes and coffee shop owners was echoed in several interviews with Amsterdam residents, including Roy Van Kempen, a 31-year-old marketing manager who has lived in Amsterdam since 2008.

“Paris has the Eiffel Tower, and we have the Red Light District and this idea that everything is possible in Amsterdam. And I would like to keep it like this, actually,” he said.

But Irina, Mr. Helms, Mr. Van Kempen and half a dozen other Amsterdammers interviewed agreed that the city center has a major problem: A tourism “monoculture” has taken root, and residents are being pushed out. Businesses and services that used to cater to locals — high-quality bakeries, butcher shops, and the like — have been replaced by trinket shops, ice-cream parlors and “Nutella shops,” which serve takeaway waffles and other treats smeared in the hazelnut spread, mainly to tourists. Meanwhile, rising housing prices — due, in part, to the rise of Airbnb and other vacation rental platforms — have made the city center unaffordable for many locals.

This monoculture has been thrown into the spotlight over the past year, Ms. Udo said, adding that she had been struck by how deserted the city center has felt during the pandemic, especially compared to other parts of Amsterdam. “That was a real eye-opener,” she said. “There are not enough people living there and working there to get this liveliness back in the neighborhood when the visitors are gone.”

Marry an Amsterdammer

Alongside the restrictions proposed by the mayor’s office, city officials and some residents have also tried softer approaches to tackling the problems associated with tourism, some of which were rolled out with success before the pandemic.

One critical strategy has been to try to reach visitors before they even arrive. Amsterdam’s Enjoy and Respect campaign, which launched in 2018, targeted the primary source of the behavior problems — Dutch and British men between the ages of 18 and 34 — with messages about the fines they could incur by urinating in the street, littering or getting drunk in public areas. A subsequent survey showed that the messages had reached at least part of that audience, but measuring the campaign’s effectiveness has proved to be a challenge.

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