New York Champion
Park Avenue, Manhattan, NY
Wednesday, August 11, 6:45 P.M.
Norbert Champion’s greatest asset — his friends teased — was a big nose. ‘His nose is so big because the air is free’, they’d continue the banter. It was his friends’ hint-and-a-half way of saying Norbert dripped with greed. Champion looked at his greedy world through thick glasses. Without it, he wouldn’t find his way home. He kept a thinning hair longer to give the impression of thickness, greying on the sides, old and lusterless. Without a healthy bank account, not even mature toothless prostitutes, in heat, would find him interesting.
Norbert was not a typical multi-millionaire. Not born with a social conscience, he often believed he was one of those chosen to be idolized due to his quick rise from rags to riches. He came from a poor background in a small hamlet just outside Laramie in Wyoming.
In essence, from the point of view of a number of old, entrenched and privileged New York moneybags, he was an outsider. He was part of the new greed money that recently made it big in the Big Apple.
Norbert was a social climber intent on ascending the ladder on the backs of political hacks and government grants. He once was a regular farmer until he found out about a multi-billion dollar farm subsidy given by the U.S. government to obscenely rich individuals.
Through contacts in the government, he applied for farm grants after learning that several Manhattan multi-millionaires — and some billionaires — had been receiving the subsidy. All he needed were tracts of land to own. These tracts of land were government-owned properties and through shrewd manipulations and political contributions, Champion was able to secure pieces of prime American real estate property making him a multi-millionaire-member of Manhattan’s famous ‘Welfare Kings & Queens’.
In no time, after moving to a swanky penthouse in the Park Avenue Upper East Side district, he became Manhattan’s biggest and perhaps one of the most powerful Democratic Party contributor, fund-raiser and kingmaker of some sort that his personal blessing alone would almost certainly secure a would-be candidate a spot in the next Democratic primary convention.
To understand a New York state of mind, one might take a New York minute to perceive that Manhattan had the largest central business district in the United States — the site of both the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ — the bastion of stock manipulations; the Super Bowl of excessive desire for wealth and power.
Manhattan was home to the largest number of corporate headquarters in the country, most especially the seat of ultimate greed known throughout the world as the venerable Wall Street Bankers that caused a major upheaval in world economies causing global recession and the collapse of the US economy in 2008-2009. Manhattan was the center of New York City and the New York metropolitan region, hosting the seat of city government and a majority portion of the area's employment, business and entertainment activities; no wonder most natives of New York City's other districts would often refer to a journey to Manhattan as ‘a trip to the city’. To some, it’s the center of the universe.
New York, New York, in a nutshell, as often endorsed by a phrase in a song of the same title, ‘if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere’, Manhattan, in particular, was one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, with a personal per capita income in excess of $100,000.
Yet, moving back the economic camera, most average income earners in the United States wouldn’t know about a $20 billion farm subsidy given to gentlemen farmers whose subsidy cheques were mailed regularly to various Manhattan residents, particularly those living in the wealthy Upper East Side area.
Champion learned the easiest way to make big bucks through political connections, how greed begat greed and how it worked.
From 1995 to 2006, the US federal government spent about $200 billion on agricultural subsidies. The Manhattan welfare kings — and queens for that matter — received 10% of this taxpayers’ money to keep them ‘afloat’. A declared welfare in reverse or a transposed Robin Hood system, the government took from the abject poor taxpayers and gave to the filthy rich, whom in essence, the richer one was, the more government subsidy assistance one would get.
In the process, Norbert learned that he wouldn’t even be required to farm his lands, yet he received substantial grants to keep his properties in pristine condition for ecological reasons or what the government had termed conservation payment program. Through various political hacks, he was able to amass 15 various tracts of land all over the country and each huge real estate property re-classified as an eco-friendly habitat appropriate for the environment.
Norbert Champion was paid more than fifteen million dollars a year not to farm his eco-properties. Through government legal applications, his ecological properties were exempted from regulations like zoning laws, which made his farm habitats taxed at a fraction of their normal or assigned real estate market values. Norbert Champion secured the necessary tax breaks, available tax credits, essential tax abatements and other lovely and readily accessible perquisites that would shrink his tax exposures to almost zero. And whatever monies he would owe the Internal Revenue Service were pinched from the farm subsidies and offered back to the government as paid taxes.
Naturally, given his penchant to support any politician he could possibly put in his deep pockets, Norbert’s tax payments would decrease further by applying various registered political contributions, which poured out from the farm grants, earning him further rebates and political favours. These made him an important tax-paying, law-abiding, politically expedient, model citizen of the United States.
He got it made.
Though Norbert was a democrat by affiliation, surprisingly, his biggest supporters were two Republican senators who belonged to the high-powered U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee and ranking members of the powerful Defense Sub-committee. Republican Senator Samuel Gregory of Wyoming referred to Champion as a democratic pit bull for his unrelenting support for democrats. Norbert was a regular monthly visitor to Gregory’s farm-grant-subsidized ranch near Elk Mountain. Through Sam Gregory, Champion was able to reduce Wyoming’s government-owned land assets down to 48%. Norbert was able to secure several thousand acres of Wyoming’s pristine properties re-classified as ecologically-friendly.
Republican Senator Richard McDonnell of Kentucky dubbed him his democrat dog. Both senators were staunch George Dubya Bush supporters often seen as guests of Champion’s Manhattan penthouse on political business. Both notorious warmongers, only death or an act of God would stop them from getting funds — legally obtained or otherwise — for anything the US Defense would need; particularly for any war effort often dubbed for a dreaded ‘humanitarian intervention’ to push American democracy on another sovereign country.
For the next few days, Champion hid from powerful political connections for self-preservation. He was in no mood to beg forgiveness.
Champion had to find his stolen old book — the quicker, the better. He knew that having his incunabulum and its hidden information out in the open would cost him his life and the life of those who knew about the ‘secret’.
A month and a half ago, Norbert’s second wife Vicky left him for another man; so she wrote in her letter. He wasn’t aware of any other events that would cause her to leave in a hurry. However, from the time she took off, two weeks had passed before Norbert noticed something amiss from his valued collectibles. Panicked, he reported the lost item to NYPD. It wasn’t the value he was after, he claimed; its disappearance would post a ‘national security’ concern. Although he suspected Vicky Champion of stealing the book, he had no proof and absolutely no idea where to find her. Leaving him for another man was a blow to a massive ego, but that didn’t faze him and he cared even less looking for her, but a missing old book could blow his brains into bits and pieces if a hired killer got to him first. That prospect made him looking over his shoulders often whenever he was out strolling Manhattan’s opulent neighborhood.
When Norbert discovered the book’s disappearance, he’d been having vicious nightmares.
Reclining in an open-air penthouse garden, a senator’s hired sniper, lying prostrate on the roof of the next building, peeked through a scope, finger on a trigger, assault rifle steady. Norbert was partly shielded by a thick evergreen. He turned. Norbert’s head exposed for a split second. A loud crack filled the air, bullet raced, Norbert’s head exploded. A senator grinned, lights up a Cuban cigar. Game over.
The scenario repeated itself nightly, or whenever Champion caught a nap here and there, reducing him to a light sleeper. He was more concerned of the slaughter that would make headlines in the next 24-hours. His pride made him distressed, often dreaming of his enemies raising a few glasses of Dom Perignon celebrating a troublemaker’s death and the demise of a secret, which could cause a sudden scandal of national security proportions.
Except for Champion, his senator friends and a few others, no one knew that an old incunable would break open a scandal that would shake the USA’s national security. There was a high probability that Vicky, once Norbert’s sexually active private secretary, lover and later second wife, knew the secret behind the old book. However, Champion believed Vicky would not necessarily know that certain surreptitious and potentially damaging information within the book might refer to a missing top-secret document.
Three days after Norbert’s 9-1-1 panic, he wasn’t surprised to receive a courtesy call from Samuel Gregory of Wyoming.
“Norbert Champion”, Sam began his sarcastic greeting, his deep voice covered with ice. Champion knew immediately it wouldn’t be a friendly chat from the republican senator. The obese politician was known to utter a person’s full name with harsh tones whenever he wasn’t in a particularly pleasant mood.
“What’s this I heard, through the grapevine, that you’re causing problems again?”
A squeaky voice somehow escaped from his lips. “Wasn’t my fault —”
“— The hell wasn’t your fault!” He exploded cutting him off.
“ Listen Sam, I had no idea what happened. I don’t even know who took it. The document might still be where I left it, in a safe place. But I have no idea where my book is and no idea if my wife took it either. Please, listen to me; I couldn’t be held responsible if the gold, Blackpool and DU funding leaks out.”
“You better get it back or I swear —”
“Alright, relax, can you recommend anyone?”
A very deep sigh intervened for a few seconds before the senator suggested a candidate. “Contact the assassin and get the goddamn book back, pronto. He’d know what to do, where to look, where to start. He’s quite resourceful. And he might find where your Vicky stashed it.”
“Did you say assassin?”
“Yes, asshole — assassin. The one I’d hire to eliminate your sorry ass if you failed to find your stupid book.”
A cough, a sigh, a throat cleared. “How do I get hold of him?”
“Leave a note with a barmaid at Wakimba. She’s the only blonde barkeep in that place. Sign it ‘Sam’s friend’. Put an email address where he could reach you — you never heard this from me.”
“Wakimba?”
“Hell’s Kitchen, Eighth Avenue; 500-block section — give her the note and leave.”