Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas M. who wrote (1748)	1/17/2003 8:19:15 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

But they do keep the Communist leadership in a lifestyle of luxury. Wine, Women and Weapons msnbc.com Kim claims he is so busy working for his people that he hardly sleeps, but his most prominent pastime is the pursuit of pleasure. The Great Leader’s decadence was recently on vivid display for a Russian emissary, Konstantin Pulikovsky. In the summer of 2001, Pulikovsky spent 24 days traveling across Russia on a train with the North Korean leader, who is afraid to fly. (The special armored train had been a gift from Stalin to Kim’s father, who was installed by Moscow as a Soviet puppet in 1945.) The younger Kim brought along a pair of bulletproof Mercedeses loaded onto a boxcar. Pulikovsky and Kim whiled away the hours talking about the high percentage of beautiful Russian girls in Paris nightclubs, a subject Kim somehow seemed to know a great deal about. Female employees on Kim’s train were so beautiful and sang with such “gorgeous voices” that Pulikovsky believed them to be professional actresses along for the ride. These indulgences were typical, if earlier accounts from defectors and the occasional Western visitor are to be believed. In 1998, a Mercedes-Benz representative was taken aback when Kim ordered 200 Class S Mercedeses at $100,000 apiece; the $20 million price tag was one fifth of the aid promised to North Korea that year by the United Nations. An avid womanizer, Kim has been married at least four times, once to a dancer, and is said to favor leggy Scandinavian blondes. As a young man, he created “pleasure teams” to service him and his father. One defector described a party at which women band members gyrated in tank tops and microminis while the guests cheered them on with toasts of a fiery rice liquor called Eternal Youth. A visitor to Kim’s seven-story pleasure palace in Pyongyang (complete with karaoke machine) watched him riding about his pool on a raft propelled by an automatic wave maker, as a female doctor and a pretty nurse swam alongside. LAVISH HABITS On the train journey across Russia in 2001, Kim dined on lobster—with silver chopsticks—and fine wines flown in from Paris. “He prefers Bordeaux and Burgundy,” reported Pulikovsky in his published account of the trip, which caused a minor diplomatic flap for its indiscretions. Kim has actually cut back on his drinking to about a half bottle of red wine a night. For many years the then Dear Leader favored Hennessy VSOP cognac, but in 1992 he switched to Hennessy Paradis, at $630 a bottle. In 1994 Hennessy confirmed that Kim was its single biggest buyer of cognac for two years running. .... He has quietly salted away more than $4 billion in Swiss bank accounts, according to Chuck Downs, a Korea expert and Defense Department official in the Clinton administration. For years, Kim has been using forced labor to mine gold from a mountain in Korea; the gold is deposited directly into his Swiss accounts. Kim maintains a villa in Geneva (where his son was educated) as well as five other villas in Europe, one in Russia and one in China. The world can only hope that one of them becomes his retirement home.