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This column doesn’t always abound with praise for President Biden and his administration. This week’s is an exception.
On Oct. 8, the day after the greatest atrocity in Jewish history since Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Jews in Israel and the diaspora woke up without a leader. The prime minister of Israel has never been, in a formal sense, the leader of the Jews — even when the office was held by people far worthier than Benjamin Netanyahu.
But the prime minister does have the most important job in the Jewish world, which is to ensure that Israel be a safe haven for Jewish life. The Jewish people have long memories; whatever happens next, Netanyahu will be remembered, irrevocably, as the man who failed — not tragically, much less heroically, but selfishly, arrogantly, despicably. He maintains political authority but is devoid of moral authority. I cannot imagine a future for him or his cabinet of blowhards and toadies except in exile, walled compounds or prison cells.
Biden stepped into the vacuum. I have read, probably a half-dozen times now, his Oct. 10 speech about the massacres. For its moral clarity, emotional force and political directness it deserves a place in any anthology of great American rhetoric. Without equivocation, without the mealy-mouthed clichés and evasions that typified so many institutional statements about the assault, the president said what Jews desperately needed to hear.
That the massacres were “pure, unadulterated evil.” That there is “no excuse” for what Hamas did. That Israel has an affirmative “duty” to defend itself, not simply a passive “right.” That the United States will make good on its commitment to a Jewish state not with feeble statements of solidarity but with the surge of military force. A few days later, in an interview with “60 Minutes,” he called the assault “barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust.”
We need political leaders who maintain the capacity to call out barbarism by name and who commit themselves to its defeat. We need it especially on the political left, certain corners of which waited only a few days before returning to their usual program of denouncing Israel for its alleged or anticipated war crimes. These are the same people who sometimes pretend to believe in Israel’s right to self-defense but offer no plausible strategy for how Israel can exercise it against a terrorist enemy that hides behind civilians.
We also need Biden’s leadership given the moral void on the right. I spent the years of Donald Trump’s presidency being hectored by a certain type of Jewish conservative who insisted that Israel had never had a better friend in the White House. Today, Trump takes a dimmer view of Netanyahu — less because of his failed performance than because he can’t forgive the prime minister for calling Biden in 2020 to congratulate him on his victory. Four days after the Hamas attacks, Trump also called Hezbollah, without reprobation, “very smart.” About Vladimir Putin, he said, “I got along with him very good.”
Very good. Very smart. The Republican front-runner.
Now Biden is going to Israel. It’s a brave trip, even for a president with his vast security apparatus, given that Hamas’s rockets continue to fall indiscriminately on Israel and a second front with Hezbollah could open at any time. He is going, almost surely, to do what he does best: console the bereaved and bereft, give courage to those in fear. This is statesmanship in the teeth of far-left opposition and incessant right-wing criticism. It’s the president’s finest hour.
I have seen some criticism that the hidden purpose of the trip is for Biden to hug Israel close so that he can stay its hand, or at least slow it. I doubt it, since he could hardly have been clearer in his “60 Minutes” interview that Hamas would have to be eliminated entirely, even as there needed to be a path to a Palestinian state. That path is a long one, but Biden gets the big thing right — the former is the basic precondition for the latter. No Israeli leader can ever allow a Palestinian state to exist if a group like Hamas has even the whisper of a chance of gaining power.
I expect Biden to caution Israel’s war cabinet that a military campaign that concludes with a long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza would be a Pyrrhic victory. I expect the Israelis to reply that they cannot be asked to eliminate Hamas as Gaza’s dominant military and political actor without the cooperation of the United States and moderate Arab regimes, particularly Egypt. This is not a confrontation; it’s a potentially fruitful dialogue that will work much better once Netanyahu is out of office and cannot put his personal needs ahead of the national interest.
I also hope that Biden’s leadership can remind the decent left — and what’s left of a decent right — of what American moral leadership looks like. To stand with our allies and hold our friends. To see our enemies for what they are and treat them accordingly. To remind ourselves that as others see us, so should we: as the last best hope of earth.
Us Swifties, Gail Williams, Dawn McCall, Eliot and yours truly, went to see Taylor’s concert movie yesterday, three hours long. Even if you are not a Swifty, you become one immediately just for the sheer entertainment. The production, special effects, fashion, and music, not necessarily in that order, are definitely worth the price of the ticket. Taylor Swift did it right. She picked a topic that females love to sing about, “men.” She and her family are now billionaires.
I’ve included a link to a New York Times article that profiles her stardom and and a link to her Wikipedia page. That’s enough information for one day.
Thank you Gary Shapiro, President of the Consumer Technology Association, for sending a group of us this video from the Mayor of New York City. Gary explained that it made him think of his dad being a NAACP member and fighting for civil rights. My parents too taught us at an early age to love and respect all mankind. I think about this all the time. We have lived a good life because of that teaching. Again, thank you Gary.
Birds are confused by lights and windows, which they don’t know they can’t fly through.
Nearly 1,000 Birds Die After Striking Chicago Building
At least 961 birds died in one night in Chicago after crashing into the windows of the McCormick Place Lakeside Center during the height of the fall migration.
Millions of birds fly over Chicago during the fall migration season, and a number of them die after being confused by bright lights or after trying to fly through a window, but the carpet of bird carcasses outside a convention center on Thursday morning shocked people who have been monitoring birds in the city for decades.
At least 961 dead birds were found outside the McCormick Place Lakeside Center, according to the Field Museum, a natural history museum about one mile north of the convention center.
Volunteers and scientists at the museum go to the convention center, which overlooks Lake Michigan and has an exterior made mainly of glass, each day during the spring and fall migration seasons to search for birds that have clattered into the building overnight. The building, which has four levels, is not especially tall compared with nearby skyscrapers.
Douglas Stotz, a senior conservation ecologist at the museum, said that he was “blown away” by how many birds were migrating on Wednesday night and early on Thursday, as well as by how many were found dead.
“I’ve been in Chicago for 40 years and bird-watch all the time and I’ve never, ever seen anything like that,” he said on Sunday.
Mr. Stotz said that the number of birds that strike the convention center each day varies.
The previous record had been around 200 dead birds. Some days, no birds die. The nearly 1,000 dead birds found on Thursday were the most the museum had recorded in the four decades that it has been keeping track, he said.
Mr. Stotz said that a large number of birds were migrating that night because their travel had been delayed by unfavorable weather conditions. Before Wednesday night, the temperature had been unusually high and the birds encountered a headwind.
When the temperatures dropped and the wind shifted, a huge number of birds took advantage of the improved conditions and flew over Chicago, which is in Cook County.
Around 3:40 a.m. on Thursday, about 1.49 million birds were in flight above Cook County, according to BirdCast, a bird migration tracking project by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Colorado State University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Around this time, a small storm system moved through the city.
“The birds hit this storm and they drop out, they don’t want to fly through the storm,” Mr. Stotz said. “So they come down to the ground, and that sets up the conditions for the incredible migration we saw — and for the big kill we saw.”
Birds are confused by lights and windows, which they don’t know they can’t fly through.
It is a problem in all cities. Between 365 million and 988 million birds are killed annually by striking buildings in the United States, according to a 2014 study by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
At the Field Museum, dead birds are turned over to a flesh-eating beetle colony that cleans the birds so that their skeletal remains can be added to the museum’s collection and used for research.
Mr. Stotz said that the high concentration of dead birds found on Thursday should emphasize how important it is for buildings to turn off their lights during bird migration season. He also hopes it will move building owners to opt for windows that are less reflective or more opaque, which are safer for birds.
In a statement, McCormick Place said that it was “truly saddened by this incident” and described its efforts to reduce bird window strikes, including participating in Lights Out Chicago, a program managed by the Chicago Audubon Society that encourages building owners to turn off or dim decorative lights.
The statement said that lights at the complex are turned off unless they are needed for workers and visitors. There had been an event during the week of the bird strikes, so the lights were sometimes on, the statement said.
“We deeply appreciate our community’s concern for the welfare of birds and your engagement with our efforts to mitigate these issues, and we are in discussion with industry experts to look for better solutions to protect our avian neighbors,” the statement said.
A large number of dead birds were also found on Thursday in other parts of downtown Chicago, said Annette Prince, director of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors.
Ms. Prince told WGN Radiothat the group on Thursday found about 300 injured birds and about 700 to 800 dead birds in the square mile it monitored.
Outside some buildings, the group found more than 100 dead or injured birds, which she said “was a very unusual and tragic occurrence.”
Donald Trump Can Snarl All He Likes, But He’s Making a Star Out of Letitia James
The fraud trial playing out in New York “adds a lot of value to her political future,” says one Democratic strategist, but taking on a prominent Biden surrogate role in 2024 “would feed into the narrative that Trump wants, that this case is about politics.”
Donald Trump is doing a brilliant job of promoting Letitia James. The former president had been punching at New York State’s attorney general sporadically for more than a year, calling James a “racist” and a “disgrace” as her office investigated whether Trump and his company had committed fraud by manipulating the value of his businesses. But now, as Trump is on trial, he has taken to attacking James on a daily basis, raging to reporters outside the lower Manhattan courtroom while calling her “grossly incompetent,” a “monster,” and even a “deranged lunatic” on social media.
The publicity offensive is certainly ugly and perverse, but it is elevating James’s profile. The attorney general has already won one enormous victory against the former president: Last month, state judge Arthur Engoron ruled that James had proven that Trump and his companies committed long-running fraud in their financial statements. “This case was brought simply because it was a case where individuals have engaged in a pattern and practice of fraud,” James said on Wednesday. “And I will not sit idly by and allow anyone to subvert the law.” Upon the former president’s departure, James told reporters that “the Donald Trump show is over” and suggested his voluntary appearance in court “was nothing more than a political stunt, a fundraising stop.”
The current legal proceedings, which could last until December, are to determine what penalty Trump will pay, from a monetary fine to being barred from doing business in New York State. Perhaps Engoron will allow Trump to walk away with an anticlimactic slap on the wrist. But the odds that James will earn a large legal triumph and accumulate a sizable stockpile of political capital look far better.
Political capital that she will cash in to go…well, probably nowhere. The earnest, consensus view is that James will stay put because she loves her current job. “Tish is not interested in publicity or what drives most elected officials,” says Roberto Ramirez, a former New York Democratic state assemblyman who knows James well from his work as a strategist on several of her campaigns. “She is the unicorn of New York politics. She is obsessed with the substantive nature of being a lawyer for the state.”
There is also the hard political reality that James is boxed in. New York senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand aren’t departing anytime soon. Two years ago James mounted a brief, half-hearted run for governor (“The people around her wanted it far more than she did,” a state Democratic insider says), and the incumbent, Kathy Hochul, won’t be on the ballot again until 2026. In the past, James has talked far more enthusiastically about running for mayor of New York City—but it is very hard to see her giving up a powerful statewide office for a bloody 2025 primary challenge to fellow Democrat and fellow Brooklynite Eric Adams.
And then there’s the more intriguing constraint on James’s enhanced prestige: She would undermine a defeat of Trump by trying to capitalize on it. Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is highly worried about turning out crucial Black voters, particularly women, in battleground states. James would be an energetic, effective surrogate—except that making her a prominent part of the president’s campaign would hand Trump ammunition. “This case adds a lot of value to her political future, and it inoculates her from what a lot of women in her position have to deal with, being more credentialed and validated in ways that men don’t,” says Cornell Belcher, a Democratic strategist who worked on both of Barack Obama’s White House runs. “But the Biden campaign couldn’t and wouldn’t use her, because it would feed into the narrative that Trump wants, that this case is about politics.”
James certainly doesn’t lack ambition. She maneuvered through the treacherous, corruption-prone ranks of the Brooklyn Democratic Party to be elected a city councilwoman, before winning one of New York’s three citywide offices, as public advocate. James had entered politics as a candidate of the left-wing Working Families Party—but ditched the WFP to make a useful alliance with its mortal enemy, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, in her successful 2018 run for AG. In 2021, after conducting an investigation requested by Cuomo, James delivered a 165-page report detailing multiple sexual harassment allegations against him. One week later the governor announced his resignation.
One year into her second term as New York’s top prosecutor James, 64, looks as if she’s settling in for at least the medium haul. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, when too many pols are fixated on the next rung of the ladder. Yet unpredictable things have a way of happening in politics. “It’s natural for a person to feel maybe I should consider other options,” Ramirez says. “Her future is only limited by what she wishes to do.” For the moment, though, James is the rare politician whose future is paradoxically restricted by the nature of her imminent triumph.
Chris Smith
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Chris Smith is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He is the best-selling author of The Daily Show (the Book) and Till the End (with CC Sabathia). Smith joined VF after covering politics, entertainment, sports, and crime for New York magazine.
I feel the New York Times non-fiction book writer, Jennifer Szalai, was a little tough on critiquing Michael Lewis. She made some assumptions about Lewis’s writing that wasn’t necessarily true. He wasn’t overwhelmed by Sam Bankman-Fried to the extent that he had trouble writing the book. He just wanted to be sure that the reader understood the way Bankman-Fried’s mind works. That’s something most people will never understand—LWH.
Even Michael Lewis Can’t Make a Hero Out of Sam Bankman-Fried
“Going Infinite,” Lewis’s new book about the disgraced crypto billionaire, defies the author’s winning formula of upbeat narratives and unsung genius.
Sam Bankman-Fried leaving a U.S. federal courthouse in New York City in February. Credit…Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock
GOING INFINITE: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, by Michael Lewis
Reading “Going Infinite,” Michael Lewis’s strange new book about the disgraced crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, you soon get the sense that Lewis felt unusually flummoxed by his material. Among the reliable pleasures offered by a Michael Lewis book are his formidable storytelling skills, his comic timing, his winsome confidence. He makes sure to give you an unsung hero to root for: the dedicated public servant, the renegade baseball general manager, the contrarian investor who doesn’t get snookered by the hype. Even Lewis’s first book, “Liar’s Poker,” which recounts all kinds of bad behavior on Wall Street, is structured around a young man named Michael Lewis who leaves the “absurd money game” of finance for the bright lights of journalism and best-sellerdom.
Bankman-Fried was supposed to be another hero in this vein — or at least that’s what Lewis suggests in the opening pages of “Going Infinite,” recalling how a friend who was about to close a deal with Bankman-Fried had asked Lewis to look into him. After his first meeting with Bankman-Fried at the end of 2021, Lewis says, he “was totally sold.” He called up his friend: “Go for it! Swap shares with Sam Bankman-Fried! Do whatever he wants to do! What could possibly go wrong?”
The profusion of exclamation points is a tipoff that Lewis is at least somewhat aware how dumb such optimism looks in retrospect — especially now that jury selection for Bankman-Fried’s trial on fraud charges is scheduled to begin on Tuesday, which is also the book’s publication date. But “Going Infinite” still contains zombie traces of the old unsung hero project, one that should have taken a definitive drubbing last November, when Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire imploded. Lewis, who traveled back and forth from the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried was based, had, in the months leading up to the disaster, a front-row seat — from which he could apparently see nothing. “As late as the final days of October 2022,” he writes, “you could have ransacked the jungle huts until you were blue in the face and have had not the faintest sense that anything was amiss.”
“Not the faintest sense”? That April, Bankman-Fried had given an infamous interview to Bloomberg’s Matt Levine in which he all but admitted that the cryptocurrency industry — the linchpin of the Bankman-Fried edifice — was like a Ponzi scheme. (Zeke Faux’s recent book “Number Go Up” offers a shrewdly skeptical view of crypto where “Going Infinite” is stubbornly credulous.) Not to mention that a crypto crash had already begun earlier that year.
But Bankman-Fried had long been positioning himself as a different kind of crypto guy. He was a vegan, because he cared about the earth; he slept on a beanbag chair by his desk, because he didn’t care about his personal comfort. In 2017, he helped found a crypto trading firm, Alameda Research, and two years later built a crypto futures exchange, FTX, because he was an effective altruist whose goal was to make enormous amounts of money to donate to worthy causes.
“Infinity dollars” was in fact how Bankman-Fried put it to Lewis at their first meeting, explaining how much money he needed to address existential risks, like an apocalypse started by artificial intelligence. Lewis found the discrepancy between Bankman-Fried’s grand ambitions and disheveled self-presentation intriguing. He was far from alone. The incessant video game-playing, the furtive lack of eye contact, the unkempt hair — it all became part of the billionaire’s brand, which was burnished by his supposed do-gooder intentions. While Lewis was shadowing Bankman-Fried, Bankman-Fried also seemed to be on an endless publicity tour, eager to sing to any journalist who was willing to listen.
And Lewis listened. He offers the quirky portrait that is standard fare in his books. We learn that Bankman-Fried is someone who is unmoved by art and disdainful of Shakespeare (“unrealistic characters, illogical plots and obvious endings”). He cares a lot about “humanity” but little about individual humans (“I guess I should care the same amount about everyone”). He has little patience with the concept of responsibility (“fault is just a construct of human society”). He allowed Lewis to read his “private writings,” in which he complained about being consistently misunderstood. “No one is curious,” a morose Bankman-Fried wrote while working at the quantitative trading firm Jane Street after college. “No one cares, not really, about the self I see.”
Given the financial wreckage in FTX’s wake, this kind of self-pity might sound like the world’s tiniest violin. Bankman-Fried is given ample space in this book to air his pet theories about what led to the collapse, while insisting that his intentions were always pure. Occasionally, Lewis will hand the mic to a devastated subordinate who finds Bankman-Fried’s excuses hard to swallow. “He made me try to believe it was an accounting error,” says one woman. He “let me go out and lie” for him, says another former employee. Lewis, for his part, says he kept trying to get to the bottom of what happened — though his endless interviews with Bankman-Fried seemed to yield diminishing returns: “I’d poke and prod and always come away with the sense that I’d learned less than I need to know.”
But this isn’t a book of investigative journalism; this is Lewis’s account of being a fly on the wall — a perspective that’s all well and good when your subject isn’t a billionaire savant who is charged with defrauding people who trusted him. Lewis seems so attached to the protagonist of his narrative that he takes an awful lot in stride. He tells us that Bankman-Fried is so worried about the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump that he was planning to give the Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell “$15-$30 million” to “defeat the Trumpier candidates in the U.S. Senate races.” Thirty million? To Mitch McConnell? To save democracy? (Bankman-Fried also said that he was told that Trump might be willing to sit out the next election for $5 billion.)
Lewis ends his story by describing how Bankman-Fried’s parents were so fearful for their security that they purchased a German shepherd named Sandor, who had been trained to kill on command when given the correct instructions in German. The parents had learned the commands, but Sam had not. “So when Sam was in a room with the dog, it always felt as if some accident was waiting to happen,” Lewis writes. “It would have been very Sam Bankman-Fried to have been eaten by his own guard dog.”
Is this supposed to be a metaphor? Or maybe an attempt at a joke? Is Lewis trying to suggest that the guard dog is somehow like those former employees who are expected to testify against Bankman-Fried?
Lewis is an undeniably talented writer, but the subject of Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t play to his strengths. He knows how to write a happy story, not a tragic one. I keep thinking about what Christina Rolle, the chief financial regulator in the Bahamas, said about Bankman-Fried soon after everything came crashing down. “I don’t think he knows why people don’t trust him,” she told Lewis. “It’s not hard to see you are being played by him, like a board game.”
GOING INFINITE: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon | By Michael Lewis | Norton | 254 pp. | $30
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
Today is the official launch. Susan Warner’s book is available in print, ebook and audio. Check out her podcast as well. Www.susanswarner.com. Susan has been my client for almost two years.
How do you survive the catastrophic loss of a son to suicide and then six months later the loss of your spouse to a virulent cancer eight weeks after his diagnosis, and find happiness again?
Never Say Never, Never Say Always…Love, Loss, and Loving Again (The Three Tomatoes Publishing) is Susan S. Warner’s extraordinary journey from loss to happiness, from despair to empowerment.
What sets Susan’s journey apart is her unwavering commitment to keeping the memories of her son and husband alive. Rather than moving on from their loss, she has found solace and strength in moving forward with them as integral parts of her life. Susan believes that cherishing their memories has played a pivotal role in her healing process.
Never Say Never, Never Say Always is not just a memoir. It’s a guide to embracing the path to the next chapters of life with empowerment and excitement. Susan’s story is a testament to the indomitable human spirit and the capacity for healing and happiness even in the face of profound loss.
Susan S. Warner is a coach and motivational speaker whose mission is to help others regain happiness and fulfillment after suffering loss. In her popular podcast, Susan is Suddenly Single, she shares her ongoing journey with an audience of growing listeners. By sharing her story, she hopes to help others who have suffered loss – loss of a spouse, a child, a friend, a parent, a sibling—understand that with loss, life doesn’t have to end, and it doesn’t need to define them. Everyone deserves happiness. However, happiness is not to be found, but to be made. The path to the next chapters of life can be empowering and exciting.
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The former President of our NYC coop (Eliot) with the present day one (Josh Rubinger) lunching at the Fontainebleau Hotel because age and miles can’t keep us apart. Josh was in Miami on biz. Love to all of our NYC neighbors.
You have to watch the video. Miami NBC spontaneous coverage of a police car chase at 6pm. It started on the North Turnpike and onto the 836 East Dolphin Expressway and stopped at Northwest 22nd Avenue. Fabulous reporting by anchors Tina Robinson and Jawan Strader. They showed how good they really are. Great helicopter coverage too. The cops were chasing two guys who were involved in a shootout. They are now in custody.
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A Hip Hop NYC Rooftop Birthday Party For Our Favorite Twins
Our co-op building in Manhattan, where we lived for 40 years, is still a hip happening place. Ten year old twins, Lila and Sam, celebrated their birthday on our very spacious rooftop with Dance Influencer Sean Green. He is the dance coach for the Miami Heat cheerleaders. He flew to NYC from Miami for this special occasion. Mom Stacey arranged the whole thing. Eliot and I are still friendly with lots of our former neighbors. We are having lunch today with Josh, the dad, at the Fontainebleau Hotel who is in town to see Romero Britto.
Lila and Sam far right
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This photo was not doctored. This actually happened a few buildings down the street from us yesterday. Instead of taking the driveway, the cab driver decided to take the steps. Everyone is okay. The driver is still scratching his head. He said he has been to the building many times, He doesn’t know why he made the wrong turn.
ARMANI SYED IS A WORLD AFFAIRS REPORTER AT TIME. SHE COVERS GLOBAL AFFAIRS, WITH A FOCUS ON THE SWANA REGION, ARTS AND CULTURE, AND ROYAL INSTITUTIONS.
Away from the glamor of Paris’ ongoing Fashion Week, French officials have warned of a “widespread” outbreak of bedbugs across public spaces in the capital. With tourists expected to flock to the city next year for the 2024 Olympics, concerns about health and safety implications are rising.
Transport Minister Clement Beaune has vowed to “reassure and protect” the public by convening a meeting of public transport operators this week to establish countermeasures against the blood-sucking pests which have been spotted in cinemas, at Charles-de-Gaulle Airport, and on public transportation.
Deputy Mayor of Paris Emmanuel Gregoire wrote a letter on behalf of City Hall Thursday, calling on Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne to take action against the “scourge.”
“The state urgently needs to put an action plan in place against this scourge as France is preparing to welcome the Olympic and Paralympic games in 2024,” Grégoire wrote, according to Reuters.
Despite being firm in his requests, the deputy mayor cautioned against “hysteria,” adding that there is “no threat to the Olympic Games,” and they should all work together to solve the issue. He added: “Bedbugs existed before and they will exist afterward.”
On Friday, Gregoire categorized the rise in bedbugs as “widespread,” telling French TV station LCI that “no one is safe.” He added: “Obviously there are risk factors but in reality, you can catch bed bugs anywhere and bring them home.”
Transport operators, including RATP, the metro operator in Paris, have said they remain “extremely vigilant” but there have been no more recent sightings since a suspected sighting on line 8 of the metro was reported on Wednesday, according to The Local France. RATP told the outlet that “each sighting is taken into account and is subject to a treatment,” adding that “these last few days, there have been no proven cases of bedbugs recorded in our equipment.”
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, bedbugs are flat, parasitic insects that feed on the blood of humans and animals while they sleep. Infestations occur in all parts of the world, but particularly in areas where people are asleep, such as mattress seams, bed frames, cracks and curves, or behind wallpaper.
Bedbugs often occur in places where a lot of travel takes place as their bodies allow them to fit into crevices in luggage and clothing. Hygiene is not a determining factor in any case. While the pests are not known for carrying diseases, they can cause skin irritation. Those experiencing symptoms from bedbug bites are advised to wash clothing and fabrics at high temperature and contact pest control services to treat their home.
France’s problem is far from a new one. Bedbugs were much more common in France before they effectively disappeared in the 1950s. But a rise in global travel accessibility led to a surge in the 1990s. Three years ago, the government launched its anti-bedbug efforts, comprising an informational website and telephone hotline amid surging infestation. By last year, the French government agency ANSES reported that 11% of French households had experienced bedbugs at some point in the years between 2017 and 2022, adding that such occurrences were not linked to wealth.
Thank you Gail Williams for telling us about the T&C article
Adam Shefferwantedhis money.
It was May 8, 2023, and Sheffer, a veteran art dealer and former executive at Pace Gallery and Lisson Gallery, stood face to face with Lisa Schiff, an art advisor and founder of SFA Advisory, who over the past two decades has acted as an art market fortune teller for the rich, famous, and powerful. Schiff could seemingly do it all: unearth the next hot painter, find highly coveted classics, negotiate sales at breakneck speed, and defy conventional wisdom by acting as a genuine mentor rather than a stuffy art snob.
Sheffer had been a client and close friend of Schiff’s for years. She was a conduit through which he bought and sold fine art. Sheffer’s most recent sale was an Adrian Ghenie painting. It was jointly owned with his husband, real estate developer Richard Grossman, and the real estate heiress Candace Barasch—who also happened to be one of Schiff’s best friends.
Schiff offloaded the painting for $2.5 million in late 2022 through Sotheby’s Hong Kong, and she transferred to Sheffer and Barasch $225,000 each from the sale back in January. But she still owed them $1.8 million. Sheffer asked Schiff when he and Barasch would get their money.
Schiff had built a brand so steadfast, so unimpeachable, and she had counted so many of the art world’s elite as friends and confidants—including Leonardo DiCaprio, her most high-profile client—that Sheffer was shocked when Schiff told him that she didn’t have the money and that he should call her lawyer.
These allegations form the basis of a lawsuit by Grossman and Barasch against Schiff and her advising companies filed in the spring. One month later Barasch and her husband filed a second lawsuit against Schiff and her companies relating to other artwork dealings. According to the allegations in these lawsuits, when Schiff told Sheffer she didn’t have the money, she just turned around and walked away.
For Sheffer and Barasch, they were given a valuable lesson: Never mix friendship with business.
By all outward appearances, Lisa Schiff was a cornerstone of the art ecosystem. She had been lauded as a highly successful entrepreneur who carved out a coveted career consulting for wealthy individuals who wanted to amass valuable collections, or at least park some of their money in art. She wasn’t merely a dealer or a gallerist or a broker but an amorphous oracle, someone whose taste and expertise granted her access to moneyed circles in New York, Los Angeles, and London.
In the fine art world, where social posturing and business jockeying are part and parcel of success, Schiff seemed to have accomplished the ultimate coup, elbowing her way into a market that was drowning in money. The Financial Times once said that Schiff was “disrupting the art advisory business.” Schiff herself put it this way to CNN Style: “I’m always flying by the seat of my pants.”
It had been a meteoric rise for Schiff. She wasn’t a nepo baby from Manhattan art royalty; she grew up in Florida and majored in art history at the University of Michigan. She studied for a time in France, received her master’s in art history at the University of Miami, and pursued a PhD at the City University of New York (she never finished her dissertation).
While in New York, Schiff worked at the auction house Phillips (“It was a shitshow,” she told Artsy) and later became the director of Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, where, Schiff once said, she learned “the art of the deal.” She also held teaching positions at Hunter College, the College of Staten Island, and Nassau Community College. The world of academia, however, was not very lucrative, and in 1999, after Schiff turned 30 and her parents stopped subsidizing her big city lifestyle, she had to find a new way to make a living.
In 2002 she hung up a shingle, launching SFA Advisory. “It was kind of ballsy. I had no idea what I was doing,” she told Artsy. “I just couldn’t function in the system. I was always feisty and frustrated.” Schiff promoted her gritty, built-from-the-ground-up personal brand and, helped by her nerdy love of art history and penchant for luxury, quickly found herself gathering clients and fitting in among Manhattan’s one-percenters and power brokers.
When Schiff founded her consulting firm, few fine art advisors existed. According to the Association for Professional Art Advisors (APAA), in 2000 there were only 60 enrolled members. Over the past two decades, however, the practice has expanded dramatically; the APAA now has 156 members, and untold more have staked their claim in this largely unregulated corner of the industry. “There are many practitioners who adopt the title of ‘art advisor’ without the schooling, experience, and integrity to properly facilitate the collecting ambitions of their clients,” says APAA president Alex Glauber. “APAA membership standards are designed to counter the realities of a field with no barriers to entry. Collectively, these standards aim to define advisory best practices within an amorphous field often impugned by those unqualified at best and deceitful at worst.”
Schiff, for her part, has never been a member of the APAA, and she admitted in 2012, in a live discussion with Jane Morris of the Art Newspaper of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, that “the art world is the easiest place to do shifty business on every level, shape, or form. You can scheme…you can lie, you can double-dip.” She added that “it takes a long time to figure out that you’re talking to someone who is a bit of a shyster. There’s a lot of shysters around.” At Art Basel years later, Schiff said of her relationship with clients, “I don’t own them. It’s not my money. I’m just a sounding board.”
Nonetheless, Schiff hoped to be a guiding light for would-be collectors and eager aficionados by “getting in the head of my clients, helping them find the best of what they love,” she told CNN Style, adding cryptically that “some of the machinations behind the scenes are so disgusting.” Above all, she said, she wanted to protect her clients, and on LinkedIn she wrote that her company had “been able to cultivate critical trust on all sides, ensuring access to the most desirable and highest-quality works.”
In a profession where proximity to money means everything, Schiff landed her most formidable and enduring client in 2004: the multimillionaire real estate heiress Candace Barasch, whom everyone, including Schiff, calls Candy. As stated in Barasch’s legal complaints, they met through Adam Sheffer, who was then the sales director at the Cheim & Read gallery and who had recently become Schiff’s client. Barasch had been dipping her toe into the high-end art market since 2000, focusing primarily on photography, but she soon graduated into all manner of modern and contemporary art, which gave her and Schiff a shared passion.
They quickly became best friends. “Almost immediately after I met Schiff, she began cultivating a personal friendship with me that transcended our business relationship,” Barasch said in court documents, “to the point that my family and I considered Schiff like a member of our family.” Schiff shared the same deep-seated connection with Sheffer and Grossman, who in 2013 attended the bris of Schiff’s son and acted as “adjunct parents” to him, even attending Father’s Day events at his school. They also went on trips together. In a post on Schiff’s now-deleted Instagram account, she featured a photo of Sheffer walking with her son on the beach in St. Barts with the caption, “We love you Uncle Adam.”
By 2012 Schiff claimed to have a dozen clients and was presumably making a lot of money advising them. And as the years went on, she and Barasch seemed to be virtually joined at the hip, with Schiff babysitting Barasch’s pet and “removing and storing personal correspondences for her,” Schiff wrote in a court filing. This may have muddied Schiff’s perception of her professional obligations to her client. “You have to draw a line between being friendly with your clients and being friends with your clients,” says Todd Levin, who spent 12 years on the APAA board of directors and has 40 years of experience as an advisor. “Becoming friends makes things more complicated.”
As alleged in her legal complaints, Barasch trusted Schiff so much that she allowed her to be the exclusive custodian of her art inventory and transaction records, and even gave her access to her credit cards for expenses. Every dollar that Barasch spent on art passed through Schiff’s bank accounts. They spoke on the phone every day and, over time, became more like sisters than friends. “I think it’s important to find advisors who aren’t clinging to their clients in a way that they own them,” Schiff once said.
In 2014 Schiff wrangled her most high-profile client: Leonardo DiCaprio, as well as his fledgling namesake nonprofit. This raised Schiff’s status in the industry immensely—and gave her a heightened sense of importance. According to a source with knowledge of the incident, Schiff once attended a show on behalf of DiCaprio at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. When she was told that she was not first in line for a specific piece, she became irate. DiCaprio allegedly gave Schiff Larry Gagosian’s cell phone number to try to work out a deal. Schiff called Gagosian at 7 a.m. and made her displeasure extremely clear. After the call Gagosian asked one of his employees, “Who the fuck is Lisa Schiff?” (It’s unclear whether the sale ever transpired.)
Nonetheless, Schiff curated DiCaprio’s annual art auction galas in St.-Tropez and Sonoma County; they featured works by Pablo Picasso, Jeff Koons, Ai Weiwei, David Hockney, and Damien Hirst. Schiff’s relationship with DiCaprio, however, was short-lived. They parted ways in 2018, for undisclosed reasons. “I loved working with Leo,” Schiff told CNN Style. “I miss Leo.” (Her son is named Leonardo.)
Schiff’s proximity to the über-wealthy appeared to have elevated her taste for luxury, a shift that Barasch saw firsthand as her friendship with Schiff deepened. According to detailed allegations in Barasch’s lawsuits, Barasch and Schiff frequently traveled together to art-related events, and Schiff would spend lavishly: $32,400 at Loewe in Paris, $20,000 worth of jewelry, international first class travel with concierge and limousine services, and accommodations at five-star hotels. Her expenses were also piling up at home: $25,000 in monthly rent for her Manhattan apartment, a luxury unit in the Colonial House apartment complex in West Hollywood (where Bette Davis once lived), and her son’s private school tuition. While speaking on a panel at Art Basel in 2019, Schiff said, “I’m pretty much broke.”
Lisa Schiff
Despite this admission, nothing seemed amiss to those who knew Schiff best. In fact, she was working harder than ever. She traveled to China, Brazil, and India to find art for her swelling list of clients. This included Barasch, who alleged in her lawsuits that she paid Schiff a 10 percent commission on all transactions and had presumably become Schiff’s most prolific source of income. As reported in the New York Times, by 2019 she had helped Barasch amass a collection of roughly 600 pieces, likely worth tens of millions of dollars. (According to Schiff’s court filings, she also helped Barasch secure more than $10 million in profit by selling pieces from her collection.) They rotated pieces in and out of Barasch’s Park Avenue apartment once per year, according to the culture’s current theme. “It’s a shared vision,” Barasch told the Times. “Hopefully, we’ll put this story together so down the line there’s a coherent idea about where we are as a society.”
In 2018 Schiff plotted her next move: a luxury ground floor commercial outpost on White Street in Tribeca that acted as her office, an exhibition space where she could sell pieces on consignment, and a swanky artist hangout. She signed a 10-year lease and enlisted famed interior designer Rodman Primack to reimagine it. The slightly wonky open-concept space was transformed over the next year into a frenetic menagerie of colors and textures and bric-a-brac, a fireworks display of maximalism that seemed to reflect Schiff’s personality and outlook on life. “She obviously had a lot of money,” says Gennaro Brooks-Church, an artist who designed and built a $36,000 plant installation for the space. Brooks-Church says that he and Schiff had a falling out after Schiff refused to pay his fee for ongoing upkeep of the organic statement piece. “Looking back, I think she was very naive. The feeling I got was, Yeah, we’ll spend all this money on this space, and then it will all work out. But there was no real plan that I knew of.”
Schiff also opened an office in London, which raised some eyebrows within the industry. “I knew who some of her clients were, and I had some idea of what they were buying, and the math didn’t add up,” Todd Levin says. “I didn’t know where all the money was coming from.”
After Schiff unveiled her Tribeca space, in 2019, she told Architectural Digest that everything inside was purchasable, a sort of hyper-expensive, bohemian garage sale. “The Richard Princes, the rug—if people wanted to come and buy any of it, I would be okay with that,” she told the magazine. It was a befuddling expansion for someone who largely operated in the shadows of the art market (why have a public-facing space if she dealt only with private clients?), but as a publicity stunt, it worked: Schiff’s business seemed to be booming. Later that year she celebrated her 50th birthday with a party during Art Basel in Miami. Swizz Beatz and Rosario Dawson attended.
They next year, however, wasn’t so sunny. As alleged in Barasch’s lawsuits, Schiff told her that in January 2020 she checked herself into a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program in San Francisco that allegedly cost $100,000, “for her addiction to chardonnay.”
When the pandemic hit, she went back to New York and laid off some of her staff (she admitted to Artsy that she “sucks” at being a manager), and saw the art market change from the rarefied world of gatekeepers in which she had established her prowess to a speculative free-for-all dominated by NFTs. She continued to focus on breaking through the noise and elevating her brand. A media blitz followed, with a lengthy profile on Artsy claiming that Schiff wanted to “fix the art market” and another piece in Cultured that covered an exhibition hosted in her Tribeca storefront. The Cultured reporter pointed out the apparent conflict of interest of an advisor moonlighting as a gallerist and a dealer and asked her why she was hosting a for-profit show. “That’s a bit more complicated,” Schiff said, without explaining further.
In hindsight one could see the professional moves Schiff made over the past half decade as a desperate bid to generate more income. Truthfully, all was not well behind the scenes. Her business was floundering, and according to Barasch’s lawsuits she had allegedly begun to misappropriate customer funds to prop up her lavish lifestyle and settle outstanding debts to clients, galleries, and dealers. The two lawsuits that Barasch filed against Schiff and her companies earlier this year include detailed allegations suggesting that, by 2022, Schiff’s financial difficulties were coming to a head. For example, they allege that in the summer of 2022 David Kordansky of the Kordansky Gallery called Barasch about an outstanding payment—despite Barasch’s having already paid Schiff for the artwork in full. Schiff dismissed the snafu as an innocent oversight caused by her busy schedule. Their friendship stayed intact. (Kordansky did not respond to requests for comment.)
Despite her financial turmoil, Schiff appeared to be living her life as if nothing were wrong. Throughout 2021 and ’22 she documented on social media luxurious vacations to Mexico, the Caribbean, Rhode Island, and Italy, and she also bounced around the Hamptons, Denver, and Miami. She even went to Paris and London with Barasch to look at, and presumably purchase, art. But the foundation under Schiff continued to crumble, and as the walls closed in she became more desperate to broker sales and buy time.
Barasch’s lawsuits allege that although Schiff had been paid in full by Sotheby’s for the sale of the Adrian Ghenie painting in January 2023, Schiff told Barasch, Sheffer, and Grossman that the buyer needed more time to come up with the full amount of the sale. On April 10 Schiff texted Sheffer, “Just checked in on [G]henie payment!… What else can we work on?”
The lawsuits further allege that two weeks later Schiff again tried to delay, texting Sheffer: “Ok so…they are trying but can’t guarantee. Buyer is also trying. No one is worried. So trying for 2 weeks but could be 1 month and no longer—guaranteed.” Schiff continued to encourage Sheffer to buy artwork and pressured Barasch for payments on pieces that she had earmarked for purchase. On May 4, Barasch wired Schiff $190,531.
On May 8 Sheffer confronted Schiff in person about the payment still owed to him, Grossman, and Barasch. Schiff finally admitted that the money was gone. After their meeting Schiff texted him, “I am sorry and have every intention to make things right. It’s just complicated. I know you will never speak to me again but I will try to make it right regardless.” Schiff, likely knowing that Barasch had gotten word, texted her the same day, saying, “Know that I love you. Not able to talk but later today…”
When they got on the phone, Schiff allegedly explained that over the past few years she had dug herself a vast financial hole and had debated filing for bankruptcy before the pandemic but decided against it for fear of criminal exposure. She also claimed that she had used her time in rehab to map out a plan to fix the mess that she had created for them both. Barasch says she was shocked, dismayed, and heartbroken. She asked the woman she considered a member of her family where her most recent payments—more than $300,000—had gone. “I don’t know,” Schiff responded. Barasch pressed further. How much of the art that she had supposedly purchased through Schiff hadn’t actually been paid for, and how long had this been going on? To the former, Schiff couldn’t give a concrete answer. To the latter: more than three years.
After Schiff’s alleged admission that she had essentially lost vast sums of her best friend’s money, Barasch says she dove into a frenzied game of telephone, contacting many of the galleries from whom she had instructed Schiff to purchase art since 2020. The results were not good: She found at least 16 pieces for which she alleges she gave the money to Schiff but the sellers of which had not been paid. The damage stung like a fastball hitting a catcher’s mitt: $1.5 million.
Barasch tallied up the total she had transferred to Schiff for artworks just over the past 18 months: $6.6 million. Barasch feared that most if not all of that money was likely gone, with no art to show for it. She was forced to take a drastic step: sue her former best friend in New York Supreme Court. In May 2023 Barasch filed her first lawsuit, along with Grossman, alleging that Schiff and her companies had failed to pay them for the sale of the Ghenie painting. A month later Barasch filed a second lawsuit, this time with her husband and the family trust, claiming that Schiff had mismanaged other art transactions.“Schiff and her businesses have effectively been running a Ponzi scheme,” the first lawsuit claimed.
After talking to Barasch, Schiff emailed her other clients and told them that she had “fallen on incredibly hard financial times” and was currently “indebted to you and others and am simply unable to meet my obligations.” Everything going on was “very complicated from a legal perspective,” she said. She wouldn’t be answering any questions. They too would have to go through her attorney. In papers filed with the court, Schiff denied running a Ponzi scheme but admitted that a number of her clients are “owed money because expenses and flawed payment practices left the Company with more payment obligations than funds.”
Schiff tried to cut a couple more deals to make some quick cash but, according to Barasch’s suit, eventually settled on trying to sell thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry that she had purchased. Despite her best efforts, Schiff couldn’t hold it together. In May she shuttered SFA Advisory, liquidated its assets, and admitted in court records that she can afford neither the rent on her Manhattan apartment nor legal representation. (She planned on moving “elsewhere” once her son finished the school year.) The lawsuits filed against her are ongoing, and her attorney admitted in court filings that both federal and state law enforcement are investigating her financial dealings. Schiff’s attorney disclosed in a court filing that she is cooperating with the investigation. Both Barasch and Schiff declined via their attorneys to comment for this article.
It was a stunning fall from grace for a once revered pillar of the art world, made so much more tragic by the fact that Schiff leveraged the trust placed in her by her best friend to raise her profile and amass (and eventually squander) a small fortune. In a 2012 panel discussion in London, an attendee posed a question to Schiff regarding the Wild West quality of the art market and the dubious practices of some people angling to make large sums in it. “I find it very dangerous, actually. I don’t really see a good outcome for that kind of behavior,” Schiff said with unfortunate prescience. “What is that, Icarus flying too close to the sun? You’re just going to fall… I don’t think in the long run it will sustain itself.”
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