The Gray Bar Hotel Is Taking Reservations
Rooms in the Gray Bar Hotel are about the size of an elevator and very unpretentious – a steel bunk bolted to the wall, stainless steel combination toilet-and-sink, (maybe a footlocker for the really fortunate) and no view.
They’re designed that way.
Hopefully, after they’ve been extradited from the luxury Montenegro resort to which they fled, Richard Ayvazyan, 43, and his 37-year-old wife Marietta Terabelian will enjoy their not-so-comfy new accommodations.
The perfidious husband-and-wife team was found guilty of illegally obtaining more than $20 million in COVID-19 relief funds. Before sentencing, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson cited the “callous, intentional way without any regard for the law” the couple had executed their scheme. He described Ayvazyan as “an endemic, cold-hearted fraudster with not regard for the law” and someone who “views fraud as an achievement.” He sentenced the husband and wife to seventeen and six years respectively.
On August 29, 2021, they cut off their tracking bracelets and – with their black dog – skedaddled to Tivat, Montenegro – often called “the next Monte Carlo.”
Sin – the theft of federal funds designed to help Americans displaced and unemployed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic – is always social and often has a multi-generational impact.
We’ll never know how many mom-and-pop businesses, neighborhood grocery stores, and auto repair shops might have survived and paid their employees with that $20 million. We’ll never know how many of those employees lost their homes and life savings.
Before the grifters boarded their chartered private jet, they typed a quick note to the children they were abandoning – two sons, then 16 and 14, and a daughter, 15: “While I am writing this our tears are dripping on our breakfast table. We will be together again one day. This is not a goodbye but a brief break from each other. Without saying too much, we both love you more than anything in this world.”
“More than anything else in this world”?
Yeah. Sure. Except our money, our lavish life style and our dog!
Sin is never just personal.
Sin is always social and often multi-generational in its consequences.
Just ask those three kids.
We don’t know what will happen to Californian James Catalano, 61, who at this writing has been arrested on federal charges of cyberstalking. Just maybe, he’ll be found as mentally ill as his putrid email attacks and threats against Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime, 14, was one of 17 people murdered in 2018 at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School.
Over a period of months and in the obvious hope of inflicting even more pain on Mr. Guttenberg and his family, Catalano fired off more than 200 emails too pathetically perverted to deserve quoting. If he is found mentally competent and guilty by a federal court jury, his antisemitic, anti-LGBT, anti-President Biden vitriol should merit every hour of a possible five-year sentence – preferably in a supermax facility where he has no one against whom he can spew his bile.
[Since civility and human decency are clearly beyond his ability, we might suggest that he use his time in prison to study the basic rules of grammar and punctuation. He’d never have passed out of third grade with the IHM Sisters of Epiphany School.]
Catalano’s beyond-vicious email attacks on Mr. Guttenberg are not simply an assault on a grieving father and family. They have a social component and effect.
If his case ever reaches an open courtroom, the families of every victim of that Valentine’s Day massacre in Parkland, Florida will be forced to reexperience elements of their pain, to grieve even more intensely, if only for a moment, an unspeakable horror and a nightmare that knows no telling or end.
Sin, real sin, always has a social component.
On February 24, 2022, long-term KGB agent and current president of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine using the difficult-to-believe justification that his “special military operation” was designed to “denazify” a country with a Jewish president.
During the first week of July, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported 11,152 civilian casualties in the country: 4,889 killed and 6,263 injured since the onset of the invasion.
In late June, Omar Karasapan of the Brooking Institute wrote
In May 2022 as around 15 million Ukrainians fled their homes, the number of people forcefully displaced across the word passed the 100 million mark for the first time. This is equivalent to the world’s 14th largest country, with 53 percent composed of internally displaced peoples (IDP) and 47 percent of refugees fleeing their countries.
On June 3, Mediazona, an independent Russian news outlet confirmed more than 3,200 Russian deaths based on a wide range of Russia sources. Most of the dead were between 21 and 23 years old and hundreds were under 20; most were soldiers from small towns and villages in poor Russian regions.
It is impossible to closely approximate the number of Russian military deaths because Putin has signed a law saying that spreading “fake news” about the Russian military can result in 15 years in prison. In addition, the families of fallen Russian soldiers are afraid that, if they speak out, they will not receive the government’s promised compensation: a payment of at least 7.4 million rubles – about $120,000.
Again, sin is always social.
The UN’s International Organization for Migration estimated that by late May Ukraine had more than 7.1 million internally displaced people – those who had fled their homes but remained in the country. It is estimated that another five million Ukrainians have fled the country and dispersed across Europe. One-third of the population of Ukraine has been displaced.
War is not simply hell.
Putin’s war is sin – waged by terrified conscripts at the direction of a blood-thirsty professional killer to satisfy aims that defy imagination and with a goal – “denazification” – that defies understanding.
War is social sin. And the ripples of the small man’s sin - social sin - will last for years. Generation upon generation of Ukrainians will justifiably hate Russia and Russians.
And the social consequences of Putin’s “special military operation” are almost universal.
Putin’s war has obliterated Ukraine’s role as a global food supplier. Ukraine will not be able to harvest current crops, plant new ones or sustain livestock production at pre-invasion levels. The conflict has reduced the production and exportation of fertilizers from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, affecting access to fertilizers and thus food production in many countries.
Putin’s war has ignited what is considered the third global food price crisis in 15 years – causing a year-to-year thirty percent increase in food prices worldwide – largely due to the cutoff of supplies of cooking oil and grain from Ukraine through its Russian-blockaded ports - and a crisis that is expected to last for years.
In June, the United Nations Secretary General’s Global Response Group cautioned:
“Vulnerable people and vulnerable countries are already being hit hard [by the war’s impact on food supplies], but make no mistake: no country or community will be left untouched by this cost-of-living crisis. With 60 percent of the world’s workforce estimated to have lower incomes than before the COVID-19 pandemic, more than half the world’s poorest countries are in debt distress or at high risk of it.”
“This year’s food crisis is about lack of access. Next year’s could be about lack of food,” noted UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. “We need to bring stability to global food and energy markets to break the vicious cycle of rising prices and bring relief to developing countries. Ukraine’s food production and the food and fertilizer produced by Russia must be brought back into world markets – despite the war.”
As a result of Putin’s war, 323 million people worldwide are expected to experience severe food insecurity.
While the impending food crisis will impact various regions differently, consider:
Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa remain significantly vulnerable with one-out-of-every-two Africans in the area exposed to lack of access.
In South Asia, currently experiencing crippling levels of heatwaves, 500 million people are exposed to severe food and finance crises.
Latin America and the Caribbean region are facing cost-of-living crises with nearly twenty countries deeply affected.
With erratic rains and scorching heat killing crops and making it dangerous for farmworkers to harvest, India announced in May that it would shut down all grain exports in order to stave off famine in country – and threatening starvation abroad.
Nearly 49 million people worldwide are at risk of falling into famine conditions before the end of 2022.
Climate change, supply chain issues and economic instability linked to the coronavirus pandemic have raised costs for fuel, fertilizer, shipping and other agricultural inputs.
Less than 24 hours after the United Nations and Turkey brokered an export deal between Ukraine and Russia, Russian ships launched four long-range missiles at the port of Odesa. On Saturday, July 23, The Washington Post editorial board opined, “Compliance with the new accord would force Russia to abandon its strategy of denying Ukraine agricultural export earnings, including stealing, and reselling, Ukraine’s stockpiled grain — even, in some areas, burning crops.”
In a world in which millions are facing or will soon be facing starvation, stealing and “even, in some areas, burning crops” is a sin.
And sin, even Putin’s sin, is always social.