In the spring of 2014, I took a class of 14 students to New York City for three days to visit magazine offices. This was the first six spring-term courses that became my most popular and successful teaching at W&L, “The Magazine: Past, Present and Future.” (One of the students in that first class went on to become an editor at Garden and Gun.)

One thing I noticed about New York City in those days when the World Trade Center had become a sunken memorial, replaced by a Freedom Tower that would house Conde-Nast magazine offices, was this: New pencil thin skyscrapers had sprung up like dead sunflower stalks. I found out that these were a new kind of residential tower, thin because they didn’t need the multiple elevator shafts that office towers needed. Who had the money to underwrite these buildings and buy the condos within? For one, corrupt oligarchs from post-Soviet Russia, I was told. They needed a safe haven to launder their money, and the best place in the world for that was New York real estate.

Later, when Libby and I were driving between Lexington and Decatur a lot for my retirement move in July 2022, we stopped for a lunch visit with Linda Watt, a North Fulton High classmate who had gone to Vanderbilt and then into the Foreign Service. (At one point, she was the U.S. Ambassador to Panama.) During the time of lawless capitalism in the post-Soviet carnivale, she was manager of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. She described the corrupt wealth that everybody knew was making billionaires out of dark figures you could see in the restaurants loudly displaying their ephemeral wealth.

It turns out, before Robert Mueller became a byword to MAGA fanatics because of how Trump and AG Bill Barr turned his unread report into a “hoax” and nothing-to-see, he was the FBI director. In 2011, as FBI director, he issued a report on the money that was being invested in those weird residential skyscraper in New York.

He told the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City [Heather Cox Richardson dug this up] that globalization and technology had changed the nature of organized crime. International enterprises, he said, “are running multi-national, multi-billion dollar schemes from start to finish…. They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military…. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder…. These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”

In retrospect, this seems a little paranoid, laying the groundwork for conspiracy theories and late-model Tom Clancy movies. But I have to wonder. Why crypto-currency – an energy-wasting digital project whose main purpose is to offer get-rich-quick schemes to nimble investors and to hide criminal profits? And why are crypto entrepreneurs now lavishing contributions on Super PACs supporting Trump and Vance? And why are Trump and Vance cozying up to the crypto capitalists (not to mention Trump’s soft spot for Putin’s Russia)?

Good thing I’m not conspiracy-minded.