I have an idea for a new themed pizza chain

Bernie Madoff is back in the news again as another civil lawsuit was filed against him, trying to get back all that money he stole. That's going to be a problem. If they want that money, they'll have to invent time travel, go back to 1975, outwit two streetwise toughs, infiltrate "a culture of sexual deviance", and then dig that money out of Bernie's nose.

Fallen financier Bernard Madoff has plunged from his Manhattan penthouse to the lower bunk of a cell he shares with a drug offender at a federal prison, where he eats pizza cooked by a child molester and hangs around with a mob boss and a convicted spy, according to legal papers filed Tuesday.
...
According to the allegations – their source isn't specified – Madoff deployed an employee and to get drugs from 1975 to 2003, fueling an office so cocaine-laden insiders dubbed it "the North Pole." Office parties featured topless waitresses, employee affairs were common and Madoff kept a list of his favorite pretty masseuses in his personal phone book, the lawsuit said, claiming investors' money helped pay for it all.

I refuse to accept the possibility that coke and hookers were used to excess at any time on Wall Street. Still, I wonder if "the North Pole" was only a reference to cocaine part of the drug fueled orgies. God I hope not.

Still I'd like to know the context of the whole "eats pizza cooked by a child molester" thing. Is that a reference to how far he's fallen, a "Look at what he's been reduced to" type thing? Or is it more of a "Haw haw" type thing? Because if it's the former, I reject the notion that child molester pizza is a bad thing. I mean if you want to lure children you have to get them with things they like, namely pizza. The man can probably whip up a good pie, not to mention chicken fingers and grilled cheeses. That's a benefit Madoff is getting.

In any event that entire story is full of win. Stealing billions to fuel drug and sex parties, hanging out with mobsters and Israeli agents, fight club, a kid diddler making pizzas piled high with pepperoni, and I'm sure he's being invited to all kinds of prison sex parties as well. His life is still better than all the people he bankrupted.

Boris

It's such an unassuming, boring headline: Secret interviews add insight to Clinton presidency. You look at it and go "meh" because you already know what's in it: Clinton talking about the sex scandals, impeachment, blow-ups with Gore over the 2000 election, health care this, financial regulation that, "I could have done more". But you really need to go through it, otherwise you miss a slice of fried gold like this:

[Clinton] relayed how Boris Yeltsin's late-night drinking during a visit to Washington in 1995 nearly created an international incident. The Russian president was staying at Blair House, the government guest quarters. Late at night, Clinton told Branch, Secret Service agents found Yeltsin clad only in his underwear, standing alone on Pennsylvania Avenue and trying to hail a cab. He wanted a pizza, he told them, his words slurring.

The next night, Yeltsin eluded security forces again when he climbed down back stairs to the Blair House basement. A building guard took Yeltsin for a drunken intruder until Russian and U.S. agents arrived on the scene and rescued him.

He just wanted a pizza! Sure there's that whole "die for the President thing", but after reading that, did you ever want to be in the Secret Service more? This does raise some serious questions, and not just "Was Matt Taibbi underselling the drunkenness in his Rolling Stone obituary of Yeltsin?" What do you think the booze protocol for Boris was? Did they fly around with an oversized steamer trunk full of booze for him, did some poor staffer have to make a run each time they hit a new city, or was there a staffer trailing the Presidential motorcade in a pickup truck with the cargo bed filled with Vladimir and Banker's Club?

Pull Murray Waas and Sy Hersh off of whatever they're doing and tell them to find this out. We don't need some new depressing story on who Cheney was ordering to have killed or what CIA agent was outed, we need to know the elaborate procedures for getting Boris Yeltsin properly soused and how the Russian authorities, and foreign authorities, had to wrangle him while he was completely lit up. There have to be a million stories like this. We need to hear them.