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Of the many moments that may have moved Leo Koenig to become an art dealer, the one he'd choose, if he had to choose one, is an encounter he had eight years ago, when he was twenty and living with three roommates—two Lithuanians and a German—in an apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He'd come to New York from Munich a few months earlier, in part to avoid military service in Germany. One night, another Lithuanian stopped in, an artist named Aidas Bareikis. They had dinner and then began drinking vodka. After a while, Koenig suggested that they try snorting the vodka instead, which can be rough on the nasal passages but in this instance had the desired effect of fostering an atmosphere conducive to the telling of life stories.
Bareikis, who was twenty-nine, had a good one. In 1985, as an art-school student in Vilnius, he'd been drafted into the Soviet Army. After two months, a Soviet general paid his unit a visit. There was a uniform inspection, and Bareikis was found to be wearing an undershirt on which he'd painted the Lithuanian flag. He was sent to the brig—solitary confinement in a pitch-black cistern buried in the ground—and then to a mental hospital, where doctors could not find evidence that his affection for his native republic had anything to do with madness. He was shipped off to Afghanistan, to fight the mujahideen. At first, he didn't see combat, but he did see, while loading trains bound for Russia, some of its results: caskets, quadriplegics, amputees. He came across a mangled helicopter covered in soldiers' blood. Later, his convoy was ambushed, and he spent three days and nights behind a rock, pinned down by enemy fire. He told himself, "I've got to go back to art school."
Bareikis and a few other Baltic draftees began scrounging for pencils and grinding the graphite into powder, which they inhaled through their noses in an effort to poison themselves. They also tried rolling fingernail parings into their cigarettes and depriving themselves of sleep. After a couple of weeks of this, Bareikis, delirious and suffering from high blood pressure, was ordered to see the unit's medical officer, who was instantly suspicious. "Are you faking it or not?" he asked Bareikis. Bareikis decided to tell the truth, and the officer decided to help him. Bareikis was hospitalized and declared unfit for combat. Eventually, he returned to Vilnius, finished school, won a Fulbright, and, in 1992, made his way to New York, to pursue an M.F.A. He spoke almost no English. For money, he did construction and demolition work. He was often homeless. He found that if he slept in a tree in Central Park no one would bother him. For a while, he squatted in a loft in SoHo; on the same day he got evicted, he learned that he'd won a green card in the State Department's immigration lottery—an experience that became the inspiration for a piece titled "You Have Fifteen Minutes to Leave," which, like most of his work, was a gaudy and monstrous sculptural installation of found or shoplifted materials. In general, his work was hard to sell, and even harder to look at, but in some circles he acquired a reputation as a sort of a beacon—the genuine article.
Koenig considers the night he met Bareikis to be one of the best of his life. They stayed up past dawn and became fast friends. Months later, when Koenig mentioned to Bareikis that he was looking for something adventurous to do, a way to bring people together and have a little fun—he was thinking of opening a restaurant—Bareikis told him, "No, you should do a gallery." Koenig did, and in his inaugural show he exhibited a work by Bareikis called "Embarkation for Cythera" (after Watteau). The gallery was in Williamsburg. Koenig and Bareikis transported the installation, disassembled and crammed into garbage bags, from Bareikis's studio by bicycle. On the day of the opening, they sat alone in the gallery, waiting for people to show up. To allay their anxiety, they started in on the mountain of beer they'd stockpiled for the occasion and eventually sank into a stupor in a back room. Hours later, they came to and discovered that the gallery was full—some seven hundred guests, if Koenig recalls correctly. Art revellers spilled into the street. Among them was Klaus Biesenbach, the chief curator at P.S. 1, who liked the work enough to include Bareikis in an exhibition of emerging artists. Bareikis's installation at P.S. 1, "Yellow Peril, Friendly Fire," was purchased for thirteen thousand dollars by an eccentric collector from Berlin. It was Koenig's first sale.
Koenig likes this version of his beginnings because it accentuates the wildness of the early days, the serendipity and the cheek. It also camouflages the significance of his birthright. Koenig's father, Kasper, is the director of the Museum Ludwig, in Cologne, and is one of the most prominent curators in Europe. Koenig's mother, Ilka, is a well-known purveyor of art books in Munich. His uncle Walter is one of Europe's biggest publishers of art books. (There is also family wealth—a house-paint business going back several generations—but it has not accrued either to Kasper Koenig or to his children.) Leo Koenig grew up surrounded by artists and critics, steeped, if not fully engaged, in their work and conversation, and his surname has eased his entry into the art trade. It confers legitimacy, in a world where legitimacy is amorphous and highly coveted. Some people begrudge him his connections, and point out that making it in the art world is so easy for a Koenig that even Leo's younger half brother Johann has a gallery, despite being almost blind. (When he was eleven, he was playing with fireworks and they exploded in his face.) Some skeptics also say that Koenig hasn't done much with the head start, that he is merely a party boy—the Paris Hilton of Germany, as one art-world figure said to me, with an anonymous unkindness that seems typical of the trade. But others recognize that the advantage has as much to do with sensibility as with preferential treatment; his boyhood exposure to the art world, to its esoteric language of ideas, attitudes, and names, gave him an education that he would not have received in graduate school. Anyway, as far as the Paris Hilton problem is concerned, Koenig has mellowed, to the extent that these days he finds himself going through what he wistfully calls "a nostalgic phase." He fears being seen as a sellout, a mere merchant among the creative and difficult souls who make the art, and the hard partying seems, by his reckoning, a kind of inoculation against that. Reputation, in this world, requires a delicate balance: being both a businessman and a rascal, without being seen as too much of one or the other, or even as either one at all, entails constant adjustment, whether you are an art prince or a self-made man.
The occasion for these anxieties was his gallery's move, this summer, from the backwater of Centre Street, at the edge of Chinatown, to a big storefront space in Chelsea, as concentrated a district of art exhibition and commerce as exists anywhere. Chelsea attracts collectors, small buyers, browsers, consultants, advisers, curators, critics, and all kinds of "weirdo cats who make money off the art world in weird ways," a curator / critic / consultant named David Hunt told me. Together, they are after some kind of consensus of taste, and the money and the acclaim—and even the transcendence—that come with it.
This pursuit has got a little out of hand in recent years. Art, like real estate, has been enjoying a long and durable speculative boom, attracting, as it did a century ago, in the days of Duveen, the obsessive and competitive attentions of an expanding class of people who are very, very rich and who, for reasons ranging from the noble to the crass, have chosen visual art as an instrument for their aspirations. The appetite for new work is such that little-known artists command outlandish prices—if the circumstances align, a first-timer might sell a painting for fifteen thousand dollars, and then see its price double inside of a year. There are more artists, more galleries, and more buyers, and as a result the art world has grown more diffuse. There is no era-defining dealer, as there was in the heyday of Leo Castelli or of Mary Boone. Larry Gagosian is a powerhouse; Marian Goodman is a doyenne. But there are dozens of gallery owners out there, many of them young, with artists who, to varying degrees, are critically celebrated, institutionally represented, and commercially successful. Thirty years from now, a few of these dealers will have some claim to permanence. This depends, of course, on their artists' work, and it is the dealer's role to persuade people to think highly of it. "I'm aware that if I do my job right I will be forgotten and the artists will never be forgotten," Koenig told me one night. He likes to think that he is presiding over an incipient movement, citing as a model the community of German neo-expressionists who came to prominence three or four decades ago, some of whom are family friends. The correlation is as strained as it is personal, but it reflects his belief that, as he put it, "you create your own context."
Koenig represents a dozen artists, most of them emerging artists. There are just two women: the painter Nicole Eisenman, who had a reputation and following before she joined Koenig, and Kelli Williams, who has made just six paintings and has never sold one. Mainly, Koenig's enterprise is anchored by a group of hard-drinking New York men in their thirties, who have been with him more or less from the beginning. The artists hang out together, and Koenig hangs out with them. In this respect, the gallery is unusual, more fraternity than salon. "There is so much cheating and finagling in this business that a lot of dealers don't want their artists even talking to each other," Koenig told me. He rarely goes anywhere without at least one or two of his artists in tow. He hosts regular dinners in restaurants, arraying them around him like apostles. The artists call him Opa, the German for Grandpa, even though he is years younger than most of them. "You look for these surrogate fathers and then you play one," he told me.
Koenig's most striking attribute, besides his youth, is his height. He is six feet four inches tall—gangly, long-limbed, and baby-faced. These days, he has a beard and close-cropped hair. A few years ago, he abruptly put on sixty-five pounds, transforming himself into a startling caricature of a brau-and-bratwurst Münchner, but then he quit drinking for a spell and, with the aid of a treadmill, a rowing machine, and a sauna that he installed in his bedroom, reverted to form. Still, he can project a cartoonish persona: the way he allows his arms and legs to flap around and his eyes to bulge after he's had a couple of pints suggests that he has a good sense of what it is about Germans—bossiness, buffoonery, clusters of consonants—that Americans find funny. He often wears suspenders. His accent is not overwhelming, but his malaprop rate is about two per hour: "Can you borrow me a pen?" "Let's have a night drink."
I often heard Koenig pass judgment on works of art ("fantastic," "amazing," "crap"), but he rarely explained himself, except to mention the work's provenance or to point out a section of it and say, "Look at that," as though taste, his and everyone else's, were universal. It takes a certain amount of nerve to act as though one knows what is good or, more important, what will be deemed good in the future. It's an article of faith in the art world that some people have an eye for it and some people don't; the disagreement arises over which do or don't.
"I am happy when people relate to my way of thinking," Koenig told me one evening, over Pilsners in the back office at his gallery, Leo Koenig Inc. He was seated behind a big desk, hands clasped behind his head, a wall of art books to his left, a small neon sign that read "dealer" to his right. "And there is a monetary aspect to that. The more money you make, the more people are relating to it." By that measure, people seem to be relating well to him. Still, he offers contradictory statements about his financial status, a reflection of the murkiness of the business he is in. To the art market, obfuscation is like oxygen. One moment, he would say, as he showed me his messy one-bedroom apartment, just upstairs from his old gallery on Centre Street, with its fairly slapdash and unceremoniously displayed collection of art work, "I can't afford my own art." Then, some other time, he would say, of his new gallery space, which he currently rents for fifteen thousand dollars a month, "I could buy this in a day if I wanted to," suggesting that a couple of million dollars was a phone call away. His longtime girlfriend Debora Warner, an artist with whom he shares the apartment, told him, during a recent drunken 3 a.m. heart-to-heart, "I don't understand your financial situation."
The rudiments are this: He generally pockets fifty per cent of every sale—the industry standard. A few of his artists, such as the Austrian conceptual collective Gelatin and the versatile prankster Jonathan Meese, are based in Europe and have their primary dealers there. He handles their work in the United States, and usually kicks back ten per cent of each sale to the primary dealer. (He gets a similar cut when his artists show abroad.) Some of his artists receive money from him up front, which can result, essentially, in his owning their work. Not everyone is comfortable with this arrangement, as it implies a kind of indentured servitude; others require it. He does not have contracts with any of them. A dealer does not want to sell one of his artist's pieces to someone who will turn around and resell it a month or a year later, because then the dealer can't control who gets the artist's work, in what context it will be exhibited, or at what price it will sell. If a work turns up at auction, the dealer often must be ready to bid on it himself. He may even buy work straight out of his own artist's studio. "If I'm not happy with a particular piece of work, I might buy it and put it in storage, to keep it off the market," Koenig told me. He says that he has a net worth of zero; the profits go back into the business. That may be so, but there are probably more zeros this year than last. He estimates that he will sell ten million dollars' worth of art in 2005, many times more than he has sold before.
This has been possible because, in addition to selling his own artists' work, he has been active in the secondary market—that is, buying and selling work that has already been sold at least once. With good contacts and a good eye, you can make a fine living at it. Sometimes this involves speculating, acquiring works in the expectation of reselling them for more later; sometimes it involves matching up a collector who covets a particular work with one who wants to part with it. The market is unregulated and inefficient. "I do well with my artists," Koenig said. "But the secondary market puts me at ease." Koenig spent months this year discussing a potential offshore enterprise, with a Danish dealer named Jens Faurschou and two anonymous investors, to deal in the secondary market. They talked about the venture during the Basel art fair, in June. To keep people at the fair from finding out who was involved, they met in a private room in a restaurant in a village across the border in France, arriving in separate cars. "It was super secret," Koenig said. "A total spy thing."
A year and a half ago, a collector named Andy Hall and his wife, Christine, walked into the gallery on Centre Street. Hall had bought, in London, a painting by Frank Nitsche, a Berlin abstractionist, and learned that Koenig was Nitsche's New York dealer, so he came in looking for more. Koenig introduced himself, and he and Hall quickly established that they had similar enthusiasms, especially for German neo-expressionist painting, a category that includes Georg Baselitz, a close family friend of the Koenigs, as well as Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, and A. R. Penck. Hall had begun collecting their work. In Koenig, he found someone who, in spite of his youth, knew a great deal about these artists, and who could also claim a personal connection to a few of them.
Koenig sold Hall another Nitsche, then asked if he was interested in Penck. Hall brightened: Penck was an obsession. Koenig took Hall and his wife up to his apartment, where he had several Penck drawings that he'd purchased from his father. Hall bought these. Soon, Koenig had Hall collecting the work of some of his own artists as well.
Hall, a fifty-four-year-old Englishman who lives in Connecticut, is the chief executive of Phibro, a commodities firm. He has made a lot of money trading oil and gas. He is tall, meticulous, and extremely fit, a former president of the Oxford boat club who rowed competitively until two years ago, and he approaches art collecting with the fanatical dedication of an oarsman. He had his first New York gallery experience three years ago. "I hate shopping, I hate salespeople, and I had this feeling that gallerists were salespeople," he told me. "Also there's a whole in-ness, with regard to which galleries are hot, that I can't stand." Nonetheless, one Saturday morning he and Christine walked into Mary Boone's gallery, on Fifth Avenue, where they took a liking to a piece by an artist named John McCracken. "One of the Stepford men, one of her gallery assistants, said, 'Are you serious?' I said I was. And he said, 'Mary would like to talk to you.' " The Halls were led back into Mary Boone's office and connected to her by phone. "What do I have to do to make you like it enough to buy it?" she asked.
"Make me an offer I can't refuse," Hall replied. She did, and Hall had a McCracken.
Koenig prefers to cultivate an air of fellowship and collaboration with his clients. "They can never tell whether I'm selling or just talking," Koenig said. He has a way, when sitting with the Halls and flipping briskly through books in search of paintings for them to covet, of arousing fervor for works of art. ("Look at all those Pencks," I heard Hall mutter once, as the pages flew by. "Somehow I thought that I had them all.") Although the dealer represents the artist, Koenig also occasionally finds himself working on the collector's behalf, becoming a kind of adviser—an agent working both sides. He spends a great deal of time with them, on the phone or in restaurants. His client list has two hundred names, but there is a handful to whom he turns most often, and who are the most supportive of his artists' work.
Last fall, Koenig suggested that the Halls travel with him to Germany, to meet Georg Baselitz at his home, a renovated thirteenth-century castle in Derneburg. (Derneburg was familiar ground for Koenig; when he was a child, Baselitz would take him eel fishing after midnight in a river that runs near the castle.) At around the same time, Koenig got a call from his mother, who told him that Baselitz and his wife, Elke, were thinking of moving and were mulling what to do with their vast collection of contemporary German art—a hundred and twenty works, which occupied some twenty rooms on the castle's third floor. "Huge works," Koenig told me. "No itsy-fitsy stuff. Five or six real masterpieces." Baselitz had wanted them in a museum, and had made overtures to the local government, but talks had fallen through. Koenig didn't say anything about this to the Halls. He didn't want to appear as if he were selling something.
Baselitz has a reputation for cantankerousness, but the Halls' visit went well. "We were so excited to somehow have passed the test with Georg," Christine Hall, a slim, fashionable, and slightly giddy Englishwoman, told me. "You're always nervous that you're going to be somehow gauche." They were smitten by the collection, but the idea of buying it did not occur to them until months later, when, after several more trips of his own, Koenig floated the possibility. The Baselitzes thought of Koenig less as a dealer than as a kind of son—a boy, really—but, because he'd introduced the Halls to them, he was the obvious go-between. Eventually, Elke Baselitz called Koenig with a number.
"It was a big, big fucking figure," Koenig told me. "This was a hundred times bigger than anything I've done." He relayed the information to Hall, who had by now allowed the notion to take shape in his mind, and asked him not to tell anyone about it—Koenig had stopped discussing the matter even with his mother. "You would've had people trying to dip their fingers into the cake, so to say," Koenig told me. Anton Kern, Baselitz's son, who is a prominent dealer in New York, was not involved. Neither was Larry Gagosian, who is Baselitz's dealer. In April, Hall bought the entire collection, for an estimated price of seven million dollars. (Neither Koenig nor Hall would confirm a figure.) Koenig said that his own cut, once you factor in some additional deals, was less than ten per cent. "There's one person in the world who would or could buy that collection," Koenig told me. "The whole deal was perfect, absolutely perfect. It was really beautiful." Then he added, "It paid for the new gallery."
Hall told Koenig recently, "I don't know if I'm a complete idiot and you're the best salesman in New York or if we are really onto something here." That something involves amassing a collection that might one day be able to stand on its own in a private museum, either here or in Germany, perhaps even in Derneburg. Recently, the Halls, Koenig, and Baselitz have been discussing the prospect of the Halls' buying the castle. It would house the Halls' collection, and serve both as a monument to Baselitz and his contemporaries and as an exhibition space for new art. Koenig would have a role, although it's not yet clear what that would be. This year, Hall also bought thirty new Kiefer paintings from a gallery in London, for around four million dollars, and an additional fifteen Baselitz paintings from the artist himself; again, Gagosian was not involved. Koenig was emboldened by the experience. He told me one evening, after several pints, "I'm going to be Georg Baselitz's dealer. I'm going to be Anselm Kiefer's dealer. If it's thirty years from now, so be it. But I have a feeling."
A dealer must often make studio visits—to find new artists or to check in with his own. Sometimes collectors come along, taking the opportunity to see the artist in his element and to buy work before it has been shown, or even finished. Sometimes the dealer goes alone, keeping collectors' requests in mind. One day last spring, I accompanied Koenig as he made the rounds.
A livery car conveyed us to Brooklyn, to a windowless garage belonging to Erik Parker, whose street-waif manner and graffiti-imbued art work have earned him some attention, here and abroad. Parker, who is thirty-seven, elicits good prices—in the range of twenty to forty-five thousand dollars a painting. He seemed tongue-tied and anxious; the whine of an oil-tanker truck across the street was driving him mad. To drown it out, he'd put on a record of Hawaiian chants. The sonic mix suited the paintings, which were garish and psychedelic, with dyslexically rendered slogans about the art world and the global energy market.
"Out of this batch," Koenig explained to me, "two paintings have to go to the Basel art fair. And one has to go to the next group show at the gallery." He expected it to be sold to a couple from Long Island.
In the current overheated market, the laws of supply and demand do not necessarily apply: often, the more work an artist creates, the higher the prices he fetches. Each show presents an opportunity to charge more. Parker, for example, shows at galleries in Zurich, Berlin, Tokyo, and Milan, to say nothing of the art fairs, which have proliferated and become increasingly frenzied and lucrative. Consequently, Parker can have a show every few months. Each one leads to more critical appraisal, more talk, more buying, and higher prices. It keeps him very busy turning out product.
Parker gave Leo and me a lift to another Williamsburg garage, where Tony Matelli, a thirty-four-year old sculptor with a caustic and literate sense of humor, was applying plaster bandages to the shaved leg of an assistant, in order to make a cast for a new edition in a series called "Fucked." Earlier versions had featured models of chimpanzees and humans impaled with various tools and weapons: axes, swords, chain saws. The new one would portray a couple, already impaled, being clobbered from above by a baby grand piano. The piano, in tatters, would be sculpted out of fibreglass, plastic, and wood. "Great piece, tricky sell," Koenig said. It was destined for a show in Copenhagen. The gallery there was balking at giving Matelli an additional eight thousand dollars to finish the work, so Koenig had offered to put up the money, hoping to extract recompense later. There was a discussion about some collectors who wanted to borrow another of Matelli's works to exhibit with their collection. "And now they want to show it in their piece-of-shit ghetto space?" Matelli said, as he worked. "Please. If they were better collectors, I'd say fine."
Aidas Bareikis's studio was a few blocks away, a small space on the ground floor of an old warehouse. It was taken up mostly by a sculpture called "Mugpuller," based on a game Bareikis used to play as a child in Vilnius, to see who could make the strangest face. Bareikis must have been good at it. He had big, startled-looking eyes, an expansive mouth, a jutting jaw, and enviable bed head. He seemed dismayed to have company. There was no real business for Koenig to conduct here. The point was just to see Aidas.
"Mugpuller" consisted of a breathtaking arrangement of ghouls fashioned out of heaps of plastic toys and knickknacks, which Bareikis had partially melted on a grill and spray-painted gold. "I haven't seen this one," Koenig said.
"It isn't finished yet," Bareikis said.
"A collector from Zurich is interested," Koenig explained. "It just needs a bit more . . . intensity."
Bareikis gestured toward his ghouls. "Yeah, I need to fuck them up."
The three of us walked a few doors down to Torben Giehler's studio, a big, clean loft space hung with a few giant colorful canvases. An assistant was painting a wall white, and Giehler, a red-faced German whose shyness might be mistaken for hostility, was removing tape from a painting of a mountain composed of multicolored quadrilaterals. The assistant wheeled away a paint cart. The scene brought to mind an operating room after surgery. Giehler silently appraised his work.
"That's fucking great," Koenig said.
"That's fucking great," Giehler mimicked, in a mock-Cockney accent.
Koenig's core artists are prolific. Nearly all of them are painters, which leaves him out of step with the current curatorial enthusiasm for photography and video art. As unadventurous as painting can sometimes be, it makes for good business, because paintings last a long time, and they fit well into an existing tradition of visual art. Owing to the decorative aspect of painting, there is a broader base of possible buyers than there is for video art or sculpture or installation. Bareikis, for example, has a hard time selling his work, though it does find its way into museums. To make ends meet, he continues to do construction and demolition work. Giehler, on the other hand, can make twenty paintings a year and sell them for between twenty and fifty thousand each. (It seemed telling that while we were at Giehler's studio Koenig sent Bareikis out to get beer.)
"I just don't care if people think that painting is past," Koenig told me. "I feel comfortable with painting. It's what I know. I've tried with photography, for example, and I've failed miserably. Photography just doesn't do it for me. It's so easy to make a photograph visually compelling."
Some of the other artists converged on Giehler's studio, and then everyone trooped a few blocks down the street to a place they call May's, a nondescript Chinese restaurant that used to be a hangout for the Koenig crew. Twenty people—the artists and their mates—gathered around a few tables near the window, over heaps of moo-shu pork and bottles of beer (Koenig's favorite, Reissdorf, from Cologne, which he had arranged to have imported to May's). People wandered outside to smoke. An argument sprouted up, out of Koenig's earshot, when one artist's wife suggested that all Germans were Nazis. After a while, I found myself sitting across from Bareikis, who, with a grim and transfixing gaze, began to tell me about Afghanistan.
Koenig was born in New York in 1977, and though he spent less than a year here, he told me he has memories of it—ambient memories, SoHo in the lizard brain. He was Kasper and Ilka's third child. They were already separated when she became pregnant with him. "Leo was my present to Kasper, to try to make it work again," she told me. It didn't. The Koenigs moved to Munich and the marriage ended. Leo, throughout his childhood, saw little of his father, for whom he substituted various male friends of his mother's, among them Penck and Baselitz; Penck helped him learn how to draw. His mother called Leo der Rattenfänger, after the Pied Piper of Hamelin, because other children used to follow him around. He told me that he was "first terrible in school, then brilliant—kind of figured it out." For his final project in high school, he interviewed Baselitz. His interest in art really took shape in the summer of 1997, when his father got him a job as an assistant on the Münster Sculpture project, a once-a-decade exhibition throughout the city of Münster, north of Cologne. His father took care to treat him no better than the other assistants. They stayed together in Leo's grandmother's mansion. They got into a big argument one night, when the elder Koenig returned to the house ready for his evening bath and found that his son had filled the tub with bottles of beer.
When Leo moved to New York at the end of that summer, his mother arranged for him to stay in the SoHo loft of her old friend Hiroko Kawahara and her husband, the reclusive conceptual artist On Kawara, who is famous for writing telegrams to friends saying simply, "I'm still alive." ("I remember him, of course, but I've never been to his gallery," On Kawara said, when I unexpectedly got him on the phone this summer. This doesn't say much: Kawara has never even been to an opening for one of his own shows.) Meanwhile, Koenig's father had given Leo a list of names, which he used to secure three internships: with the gallery owner Paula Cooper, the art dealer and publisher Brooke Alexander, and the German dealer David Zwirner, the son of the gallery owner Rudolf Zwirner, with whom, incidentally, Kasper Koenig had got his start, decades earlier. Leo was working for Zwirner when he decided to go off on his own. Koenig says that to raise money for the Williamsburg gallery he bought a half-dozen Raymond Pettibon drawings from Zwirner and sold them, at a markup, to Zwirner's clients—an end run that did not endear Koenig to his boss. "Be careful," Koenig recalls Zwirner telling him. "You're starting to be clever. Don't be clever."
Amid a burgeoning Williamsburg art scene, Koenig put cleverness aside and instead played the heedless impresario. His gallery became known not so much for art as for art parties. There were benders, at home and abroad. Often when I spent time with Koenig and his artists, he tried to get them to tell me stories about the wild times. Usually, he'd wind up telling them himself. "Shall we talk about Copenhagen?" Leo prompted them, one evening.
"There should be a movie," Giehler said.
"What happened in Copenhagen?" I asked.
"Nothing," Giehler said.
What happened is that in 2000 a group of them went there for a show, and, because of a blizzard in New York, their art failed to arrive. To the astonishment of their hosts, they spent two sleepless days and nights prior to the opening in the gallery getting drunk and making new art. There was bad behavior all around. In the end, the original art work was found, but the legend of the young ruffians from New York had spread and the show was a rousing success.
"Nobody was thinking about the future, what role we were playing, how we were being perceived," Koenig recalled. "We were just doing whatever we wanted. It was as extravagant as can be." Nonetheless, he managed to turn decadence into something of a business proposition. In 2001, he left Brooklyn for Manhattan, moving to a space on lower Broadway that earned him a flash of new-kid renown but which was rendered unviable, almost as soon as it opened, by the attack on the World Trade Center, a few blocks away. At the end of that year, he relocated to Centre Street.
Koenig was determined to demonstrate independence. When he visited Cologne, he'd stay in a hotel room instead of at his father's house. When Kasper came to New York, Leo picked him up at the airport in a limousine. "He was like a kid in a movie," Kasper told me. "I said to him, 'Come on, now, it's a nice gesture, but once is a enough.' It had a naïve childishness to it, in a positive sense. It was almost depression of some kind, I guess."
"I was in a bad phase," Koenig says. He and the artists fancied themselves a kind of gang—part Cedar Tavern, part "Sopranos"—an aggressive interpretation of the old bohemian cliché. They had their own Mafia-style social club in Brooklyn, with shag carpeting, poker tables, and a painting of a horse. One night in 2002, in a Williamsburg night club after the opening of a show by the painter Lisa Ruyter (the show was called "Follow the Boys" and consisted of paintings of Koenig and his artists, among others, hanging out in night clubs), Debora Warner, Leo's girlfriend, complained to the d.j.s about the music. One of them called her a bitch and may or may not have shoved her away. Koenig punched him, and Erik Parker's brother smashed a bottle of beer in his face. A week later, Koenig was arrested in his gallery and jailed for several hours. Though the charge of assault wasn't pursued, the d.j. sued Koenig and the Parkers, asking for eight million dollars. They settled for a tiny fraction of that. Parker gave Leo a painting to sell in order to cover his brother's share. Ruyter left the gallery. Inevitably, the incident inspired a work of art: Tom Sanford, a young Koenig artist, who usually depicts African-American hip-hop stars and basketball players (he is white), is making a painting of it, with a composition based loosely on Poussin's "Rape of the Sabine Women."
It also prompted introspection, on Koenig's part. "I felt obnoxious," Koenig told me. "My father called me a fat cat and a sneaker entrepreneur. I thought, That's not me." He went sober and arranged for an off-duty policeman to keep him out of trouble, or at least to keep trouble away from him. He learned, as he put it, "when to leave." He had his first drink—several drinks—eighteen months later at his father's wedding, in Germany, to Barbara Weiss, an art dealer. The next day, he missed his flight home and spent the morning in the airport, throwing up.
One of Koenig's newer and better-known artists is Alexis Rockman, who enjoyed some success in the eighties and nineties with his colorful and ecologically precise paintings of habitats altered by global warming. Rockman is forty-three, a fitness buff, a Democratic activist, a square with a crewcut. He grew up on the Upper East Side and spends his summers in Sag Harbor. He does not drink. He leaves early. But his sales had flagged, and earlier this year his gallery closed.
"I needed to find a youthful exuberance to put me back in the mix," Rockman told me. Sanford, his former studio assistant, introduced him to Koenig. Rockman was impressed by Koenig's ability to connect his artists with European collectors. "If he could do that with me, I'd be so psyched," he said. Within a few months, Koenig had sold an inventory of about a dozen of Rockman's older paintings. "His job is to sell art," Rockman said. "That's what he's done incredibly well."
Two months before the opening of the new gallery in Chelsea, Koenig took Tony Matelli, Torben Giehler, and a painter named Les Rogers to see the new space. Koenig was dressed in a worn light-gray chalk-striped suit, a purple shirt, and square-toed cream-colored loafers. Giehler had come from Brooklyn by bicycle. Koenig held open a sheaf of blueprints and surveyed the space: aluminum wall frames, sprayed-concrete walls, a poured-concrete floor. It is in a brand-new building, on a freshly anodyne stretch of streetfront, and is flanked, mallishly, by other galleries, to the east and west. Idiosyncrasy will be the art's job. The blueprints called for a large front room, a smaller back room, and, behind a pair of huge oak doors, a vast office for Koenig.
Koenig's movements were brisk, exaggeratedly optimistic. "This floor is awesome," he observed. He was especially proud of the gut work he'd had done in the ceiling. "I paid up the wazoo to run the shit pipes through that beam."
"Well, it feels like a gallery," Matelli said.
Giehler and Rogers expressed some misgivings about the proportions of the front room. They stood near the door and imagined their paintings on the opposite wall. "I think this is narrow," Giehler said.
"It's twice the size of the old gallery," Koenig said.
The perception of narrowness derived, in part, from the placement, across from the big wall, of a long, chest-high counter just inside the door, where the gallery's staff would sit. "Why not put the desk here?" Giehler said, indicating a sort of crawl space that would soon be closed off by sheetrock.
"You can't have your employees behind a wall," Koenig said.
"Why not?" Giehler said.
"Because they work for you and you want them to work well."
The artists walked in various directions, pacing off the dimensions. "What's the typeface on the door going to be?" Matelli asked. "Everyone in Chelsea uses the same sans-serif we're-a-fucking-business typeface. It's pretentious."
Koenig didn't answer him. He got on Giehler's bike and started riding in circles, circumscribing the space with big Butch Cassidy swoops. "This isn't one of the monster galleries of Chelsea," he observed cheerfully, "but that's a big wall." Another lap. "I think this is great," he said. His cell phone rang. "You get a good cell-phone signal in here, too—five bars, full coverage."
In March, at a time when Koenig was having trouble finding new artists to add to his stable, Tom Sanford recommended a friend named Kelli Williams. She was thirty-two and worked as a teller at a Citibank branch in SoHo. She had spent five years working on her six paintings. She was shy and a little strange. Koenig said that when he went to see the paintings he was flabbergasted. "They're like jewels," he told me. "I've brought collectors there, and they are foaming, just foaming. No one knows her, but there's a myth building." He began paying her to paint, so that she could quit her day job, pick up the pace, and build the myth.
"Once she's done these six paintings, we'll have a show," Koenig said. "She has never shown anywhere, which is great. The slate is clean for me. Now I can really go to work."
When I visited Williams's studio with Koenig, in an apartment in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, the six paintings hung on three walls, in various stages of near-completion. They were small and painstaking—she uses a three-haired brush—surreal Boschean pornography in Renaissance landscapes. Williams has dyed-red hair, in a sort of wedged pageboy cut, and a wide-eyed look that somehow simultaneously conveys apprehension and assurance. Koenig went from painting to painting, inspecting each up close, pointing with a long finger at elements he did or did not like. Standing before one that was all but done, he suggested that she add a layer of varnish to it, to bring out the colors and give it a classical sheen.
"I tend to agree with you," she said. "But Tom's friend said don't varnish it. It'll look too retro."
"He's full of shit," Koenig said. Talk turned to deadlines and the timing of a solo show. "I think you should take as long as you need."
"I had a hard time getting work done in April," she explained, defensively. "I was upset in April." She told him that a French billionaire had offered to put her on salary and pay for health insurance in exchange for her work. She sent the collector an e-mail with legal disclaimers in it, which scared him off. Koenig told her that she'd done the right thing. "I'm O.K. being poor," Williams said. "I just don't want to be a failure."
Two months later, one of her paintings was hanging in the group show that opened Koenig's new gallery. It was seventeen inches by eighteen inches and depicted a contorted female figure whose breasts were where her buttocks should be. Koenig pronounced it a "masterpiece." He said, "The miniaturist style, the craft, the obsessive-compulsiveness is something I respond to." He told me that he had ten buyers who were interested in it, but that he could not bring himself to sell it. "I'm not there yet. It's not ready. It's my painting, anyway—I've been paying her for a year—and I want to own it for a little bit longer." As he said this he ran a finger along the top edge of it, a caress that ended with a flick at an imaginary bit of dust. "But she's going to want me to sell it, and Hubert Neumann is probably going to get it, just because I like him so much, and because he wants it the baddest. We're at twenty-five thousand dollars now, but I won't be comfortable until it's at fifty thousand."
When a dealer maintains a waiting list for an artist's work, it is not first come, first served. Collectors with whom the dealer has a standing relationship often take precedence. Surreptitious deals are cut; the sports term "future considerations" would be appropriate here. Dealers also prefer buyers whose ownership will burnish the artist's credentials; primacy generally goes to institutions, or to those who have private museums, and then to those whose collections are virtually museums unto themselves. When Koenig got a call about a Kelli Williams this summer from an adviser to the Los Angeles collector and television executive Dean Valentine, he said, "Straight to the top of the list!" He did the same for Steven Cohen, a publicity-shy hedge-fund billionaire who, in the past several years, has become a voracious collector of blue-chip art. Cohen's reputation is such that when he came calling, asking, as Koenig recalled, "if he was allowed to buy, I was thinking, Is this actually him or am I being set up here?" Eventually, Cohen bought a painting by a twenty-five-year-old Koenig painter named Justin Faunce, who had his first show in February, for twenty-five thousand dollars. "I generally buy only established artists," Cohen told Koenig.
In Koenig's case, the collector who best embodies the key attributes of familiarity and prominence is probably Hubert Neumann. Neumann lives on the Upper West Side, amid Picassos and Matisses that his father, Morton Neumann, a Chicago mail-order magnate (he made a fortune on beauty products), began collecting in 1948. Morton Neumann was dismissed early on by the art world as a coarse and gullible enthusiast, but in time he amassed one of the country's great collections of twentieth-century art. He died in 1985. Hubert Neumann, who is seventy-four, has been an avid collector for more than fifty years, having learned the same lesson his father did: that, when it comes to appraising art, other people are often wrong. Of Koenig's artists, he collects Tom Sanford, Erik Parker, and Christian Schumann. He is an unpretentious but argumentative man with a mustache and a Cheshire-cat grin who dresses in golf shirts and says "man" a lot. He doesn't let many people into his house to see his art. When I tried to invite myself over, Neumann told me to buy a book instead—"A Passion for Art," which has pictures of his collection. And when I asked him about the business of contemporary art, he delivered a mild scolding in the form of an hour-long lecture.
"There are as many stories about it as there are people involved," Neumann said. "It's a personal thing for me. If artists are emerging, it's got to be a personal experience with the work and the artist, and then with the dealer." He went on, "Leo's a special guy in his field. What makes him special, if you hang around this world and compare him to others, is—he's Leo. Leo is not interesting because of his father or his uncle or whatever. Basically, I think his father is a jerk. The reason Leo's interesting is that he's in a position to advance the cause of emerging art. Emerging art needs that kind of support. It's a flower that needs nourishment. It's a delicate and wonderful thing.
"The art world hasn't changed," he went on. "There will always be five or six great artists in a generation. The rest of them are just going to become dust, or different degrees of dust." Neumann objects to cynicism, and he made sure to point out, as we talked on the phone, that he was surrounded at that moment by works that had been dismissed by the world as peripheral at one point or another and that were now regarded as important. "It's a lot of baloney to be a dealer or a collector unless the art has a chance of being profound," he said. "And if the art work is profound, then the art market is irrelevant. That's what makes it magical." He cited the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his contention that civilization is defined by three things: science, philosophy, and art. Of these, visual art is the only one that you can own or acquire. "That's why it's so special," Neumann said. "That's why you have all these people running around like ants in the art world. They're all running around thinking they understand what's profound. But they can't, because it's ephemeral." He went on, "What happens is people like to create myths. And they'll make a myth about Leo. And it may even have a substantial element of truth to it."
The bulk of the Baselitz collection arrived on these shores by air in August. It was moved to an art-storage facility on Eleventh Avenue, where the Halls maintain a fourteen-hundred-square-foot climate-controlled private space. On the last day of the month, the Halls came into town, from their home in Southport, Connecticut, to conduct some business with Koenig, and then the three of them went to check on the shipment. They were greeted at the storage facility by Oliver Stebich, an art shipper and storer, who led them into a windowless white room skirted by thirteen paintings, which had been unpacked and propped against the wall. Stebich, Koenig, and an assistant donned white gloves and began delicately removing the thin layer of foam that protected each painting. Gradually, the room filled with angry color. The paintings—Penck, Polke, Kiefer, Immendorff, Lüpertz—were grim, crude, almost primitive, many of them featuring iconography relating to postwar Germany. A number of the Pencks had been smuggled from East Germany; one had been painted on an old woollen blanket. Hall and Koenig moved from painting to painting, elucidating motifs peculiar to each artist's oeuvre: painter's palettes in the Kiefers, eagles in the Immendorfs.
"I'm dazed," Koenig said.
"It's reassuring that (a), it all got here safely, and (b), it looks even better than it did at Derneburg," Andy Hall said. He drifted around the room, with a queasy grin that seemed to blend reverence for the work, pride of possession, and the anxiety of appreciating objects for which one has paid dearly. "They look better here," he said again.
"Every single one of them has a story," Koenig said to me. "They have significance."
"Four or five of these we'll bring to Southport," Hall said. "The Polke, that Penck, maybe this Penck, the Palermo, and one of those Kiefers."
After they had lingered awhile, they rode the elevator to another floor, to visit the Halls' storage room. It contained, in addition to mousetraps, a thousand or so works in crates or in partial paper wrappings, on which the artists' names were written in ink: Beuys, Warhol, Twombly, Clemente, Fischl, Hockney, Rivers, Hirst. Also, some from Koenig: Giehler, Parker, Nitsche, Rogers, Faunce.
"This is criminal, keeping all this in storage," Christine said, with a sigh.
"Wow, we have great stuff," Hall said, mostly to himself.
On the Friday after Labor Day, Koenig had an opening at his new gallery: eight paintings by Frank Nitsche. It was a grand opening, of a kind, since the first show there, a group exhibition featuring most of his artists, had débuted in the middle of the summer, at a time when the art world, true to its European roots and aspirations, had cleared out of the city. At 5 P.M., an hour before the Nitsche opening, the town cars started pulling up, one after the other, fifteen minutes apart, as though by prior arrangement. For Koenig, the paintings already had names attached. "I had certain people in mind, even if they didn't know it," he said. By seven, most of the big buyers had come and gone, and six of the eight paintings were sold. Koenig hoped to sell one of the remaining two to a museum. A young dot-com entrepreneur named James Healy, a regular customer whom Koenig referred to as a "triggerman," took a liking to the other. Healy overheard a few collectors asking Koenig if he'd hold it in reserve for them. Koenig would not. Healy stepped in and pulled the trigger. The preliminary enthusiasm of others, tepid or insincere as it may have been, was affirmation enough.
It seemed that most of the people in the gallery at this point were artists, including Matelli, recently returned from Copenhagen, where he'd sold his baby-grand "Fucked" for a hundred and ten thousand dollars, and Bareikis, recently returned from Zurich, where his installation "Straight to the Top I'll Take . . ." had sold for sixty thousand dollars. Bareikis's time abroad had been miserable. He had got four tick bites in Germany, and had been put on a course of antibiotics and forbidden to drink alcohol. "It was a nightmare," he said, looking a little shaky.
A celebratory dinner was held at Arqua, an Italian restaurant in Tribeca—an odd choice, in these frothy times, because during the art boom of the eighties it had been a sort of headquarters for the likes of David Salle and Julian Schnabel, whose declining reputations, fairly or not, have become cautionary tales. Koenig had reserved five tables of eight in back, mostly for his artists, though a few collectors, such as the Halls, who'd bought two of the Nitsches, and Hubert Neumann, who'd bought nothing, were there, too. Koenig stood to toast Nitsche. Andy Hall stood to toast the gallery. Finally, Nicole Eisenman paid tribute to Koenig, with a few remarks about how the gallery felt like a family and how grateful the artists were for that. Koenig started crying but recovered himself quickly. It was eleven, and the night was looking long. Six hours later, he was in Williamsburg, at May's, watching five women dance on top of a bar. ♦


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Architect Yamasaki, WTC & how an Insider Built the Worlds Largest Illusion
April 25, 2014 Leave a comment
This is an excellent research article by Steve De'ak, posted from Lets Roll Forums.
Why is this man smiling?
Have you ever wondered how the CIA goes about constructing their buildings? Do they put out a bid request to the private sector, or do they have their own building department for such things; or do they bring in the Army Corps of Engineers?
Being an agency of spies and depending on the intended use of the building being constructed (e.g. office space, or a weapons research lab), one would think the CIA need to be very careful when contracting architects, engineers and builders. If I were a spy, I would think getting my hands on the blueprints for the headquarters of the enemy would be a pretty big deal; and consequently I would carefully guard my own blueprints, not to mention the guy who drew them. The buildings used for clandestine intelligence work are undoubtedly designed and built differently than would be your average mall.
This is an old and touchy subject, the relationship between the builder and the client; and it is impossible to discuss that relationship without mentioning Freemasons. I do my honest best to avoid Freemasons when it comes to 9/11; it is not necessary to discuss the masonic details which become self-evident as the veil is lifted, and I only do so now for context. However much the brotherhood's symbolism permeates the 9/11 story, I feel scrutinizing Freemasonry is a waste of time which also tends to weaken the impact of the evidence. Too often a masonic discussion devolves into an Illuminati discussion; with the term "Illuminati" tending to lower the credibility of the person using it, an effect beneficial to perception managers eager to distract attention, assuage fears and diffuse suspicion. Nonetheless, when researching Minoru Yamasaki, I couldn't help but think of the ancient stonemasons:
"Early operative Freemasons, unlike virtually all Europeans except the Clergy, were Free — not bound to the land on which they were born. The various skills required in building complex stone structures, especially churches and cathedrals, allowed skilled masons to travel and find work at will. They were lodged in a temporary structure — either attached to, or near, the main stone building.[21] In this lodge, they ate, slept and received their work assignments from the master of the work. To maintain the freedom they enjoyed required exclusivity of skills, and thus, as an apprentice was trained, his instructor attached moral values to the tools of the trade, binding him to his fellows of the craft."
Throughout history, the people who could afford the expense of castles and cathedrals had a special relationship with the people who were able to build them. The guilds of builders were practically the only people allowed to leave the lands on which they were born. Simply put, the builders effectively became one of the powers behind the throne, the guys with the literal keys to the back door of the kingdom. Allegedly this is from whence the "Freemasons" of the 17th century sprang, with America being the jewel in their crown of accomplishments; however little actual stonework was involved in that dubious achievement.
This relationship certainly exists today, with top-secret clearances required for architects and builders of today's government strongholds, and it is this history that keeps nagging at me the more I read about Minoru Yamasaki's pauper-to-prince success story; one that could only be written in America.
Was Yamasaki groomed to construct props for a thirty-year CIA con-job? Let's review.
- During a time when other West-Coast Japanese-Americans were being put in internment camps, with the help of a Detroit-based architectural firm with ties to the defense industry, Yamasaki was able to move his family from Seattle to New York City.
- Shortly after World War II he designed buildings for the government and for the CIA, among others. Later he even designed a Federal Reserve Bank Building.
- He had a reputation for designing buildings to the specifications of the client whether or not they made sense; being discreet and compliant where other architects might have balked.
- The WTC was built to make a patriotic statement rather than to provide office space; the Twin Towers were marketed from the beginning as national icons on par with the Statue of Liberty, when actually they represented international capitalism, elitism and arrogance, everything for which our military and intelligence services stand.
Corporate Feudalism
To believe the Twin Towers were synonymous with America makes no sense unless you consider multinational corporations to be as American as apple pie. There is nothing about freedom and liberty in corporatism, just ask Mussolini, and there was no louder statement of corporatism than the twin phalluses of New York City. They were not natural American icons, they were marketed American icons. They represented capitalism, big-business, big-finance, and big-government, but NOT America, yet still every celebration…excuse me, every anniversary of 9/11 is bathed in red, white and blue tears of outrage, a clear indication of a propagandist's dig at a never-healing wound.
Hold on. When I refer to "America", what am I thinking? Am I thinking "Americans", and when I think of Americans, am I thinking of me? I just re-read my last paragraph, and wonder what the hell was going through my mind. Of course the Twin Towers were natural American Icons; they were hollow, corrupt shells held together with flimsy, easily broken connections. All it took was the right leverage to bring them down; they were the perfect metaphor for America, and that's precisely why they were built, to be destroyed.
They were conceived at the end of WWII by men who had the world by the balls. Their audacity and arrogance knew no bounds, just look at the size of those towers! They created an absurdly out-sized effigy of America, authored a contrived story and supplied a cast of cartoon characters to burn it down. They knew we'd believe it because we believed the news reels claiming they nuked the Japs; and after they laid the Moon Landings on us, they knew we'd believe anything as long as it was on the TeeVee.
Nowadays however I am convinced the towers were built as props for a decades-long scam; I have my reasons for reaching this conclusion and have touched on some of them here, however I have the researchers at LetsRoll Forums to thank for this enlightenment; they crossed the line from conspiracy theorists to historians and have discovered what I consider the keystone to uncovering the truth: for most of their lives, the towers were empty, hollow shells; and never were they "cities within the city". The implications are strong that they were built specifically for a 9/11-type event, possibly with that very day in mind all along.
This article is not about the Hollow Towers though, only a supplement to their story. When considering the towers might have been built as props in a 30-year screenplay, certain coincidences become apparent; take the Islamic connection for example.
Shortly after 9/11, Slate published an article that tried (unsuccessfully) to illustrate that Osama bin Laden targeted the WTC in part because he resented the Islamic flavor of Yamasaki's architecture; and that may well have been the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back:
"Having rejected modernism and the Saudi royal family, it's no surprise that Bin Laden would turn against Yamasaki's work in particular. He must have seen how Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality."
[/quote]The idea is a bit silly that in addition to hating America for occupying the holy land, not to mention hating us for our freedoms, Osama targeted the WTC in part because the architecture defiled Islamic spirituality; but however silly the premise, the article does shed light on the relationship between Yamasaki and Saudi Arabian construction projects. It should be noted that in those days (as it is today) it was very difficult to build any large Saudi construction project without involving Bin Laden Construction:
"As a scion of the Binladin contracting firm, destined to inherit some portion of its vast operations, Osama Bin Laden would certainly have been aware of Yamasaki's Saudi Arabian projects. Indeed, his family may have built them. (Minoru Yamasaki Associates won't say, but the Binladens were involved with almost all royal construction.)"
[/quote]It should also be noted that at the time Yamasaki was riding high in Saudi Arabia building large government projects with the likely help of Bin Laden Construction, the CIA was basically running the country:
"If postwar America became, in the words of Harvard anthropologist Enseng Ho, "an empire without colonies," then Arabia was certainly part of that invisible empire. We Americans built Aramco, built the company towns of the Eastern Provence, built the Dhahran air base…
…The Saudi intelligence apparatus is modeled after our CIA – and for decades American intelligence officers, often embedded inside Aramco, were the closest of advisers to the king.
…We aligned ourselves with Wahhabi royalists and against secular Arab nationalists, and when the House of Saud was threatened by Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait in 1990, we sent an army of half a million Americans to defend the Kingdom. All of this was done because of our desire to control Arabian black gold."
[/quote] Source
There is a history there, and that history could have given birth to stories like the one linked below. Are these stories planted rumors designed to further confuse an already confused issue; or are they rumors borne of the overlapping history of Bin Laden Construction and of Yamasaki? Or is there any truth to it?
"I knew why. Because, when I was there, there were these engineers from Saudi Arabia, actually part of the Bin Laden construction company, because Yamasaki [WTC main architect] worked with them and built them up…and they started in Arabia and worked for Yamasaki, and was doing all kinds of things for them, airports, schools, doing very large projects…and he just brought them over. And I saw these guys…these swarthy looking guys wandering around, and some of them were asking me "where would you put demolition devices?" "Well, I'm not really an engineer, but I'm curious to know [laughing] why, why would you put things in to demolish it, when it's not even built?" Then he replied "Well, that's the way things are going now." Here's why."
Regardless of the true or false rumors behind the Twin Towers, the history can't be denied. Whatever the reasons for their being constructed and whatever the reasons for their being destroyed, their destruction DID spark a Global War On Terrorsim. Whether or not Yamasaki was an "asset", the construction of the Twin Towers DID give pretext to another asset, Osama bin Laden to publicly declare war against the USA; giving credence to the Official Story that al Qaeda jihadists were responsible for 9/11. And finally, the destruction of the Twin Towers gave pretext to the US Military to invade the world. The whole tinny, tawdry, thirty-year tale fairly screams, "Hegelian dialectic!"
Yamasaki's tie to the CIA-backed Saudi construction industry isn't the only coincidence when it comes to 9/11; with the Saudis, the CIA and the Bush family lies a coincidence that simply can't be ignored; but that's a subject best left for another time.
Blast From The Past
Yamasaki was a perfect mark to be manipulated. He and his family were Japanese at a time when racism was state policy and America was at war with Japan. They were vulnerable, dirt-poor, and living on skid row:
"Yamasaki had grown up in Yesler hill, the Seattle neighborhood that gave birth to the term skid row, originally a nickname for the log slides that once carried timber down to the waterfront and later, of course, an insulting slang term for a slum – like the neighborhood."
[/quote] Source
Before the war, Yamasaki's story read like a fairy tale nightmare of Americana; if he hadn't been in that role, America would have needed to invent him. A desperately poor son of Japanese immigrants puts himself through school during the Great Depression while living and studying in a racist country soon to be at war with the native land of his parents.
He was suspected and accused of spying, yet he was allowed to design a naval station:
[quote]"When he married his Japanese-American wife two days before Pearl Harbour, it looked like foreknowledge and he was investigated by the FBI. After a thorough vetting, he was allowed to work on the design of a naval station, but found himself constantly reported as a spy."
[/quote] Source
During WWII, when most Japanese-Americans were being rounded up and put in cages, Minoru Yamasaki was able to roam freely. Details are few as to why Yamasaki was granted freedom over so many others, but it seems he could thank the architectural firm of Smith, Hinchman and Grylls:
"After moving to New York City later in the 1930s, Yamasaki enrolled at New York University for a master's degree in architecture and got a job with the architecture firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, designers of the Empire State Building.
In 1945, Yamasaki moved to Detroit, where he was hired by Smith, Hinchman and Grylls. The firm helped Yamasaki avoid internment as a Japanese-American during World War II. He also sheltered his parents in New York City during this time. Yamasaki left the Detroit firm in 1949 and started his own partnership."
[/quote] Source
The accounts don't explain HOW Smith, Hinchman and Grylls helped Yamasaki avoid internment, or why they helped him in 1942 but didn't hire him until 1945. According to the records Yamasaki worked for Shreve, Lamb and Harmon from the late thirties until being hired by Smith, Hinchman and Grylls in 1945. The problem I have with this story is timeline.
Yamasaki was a native nisei whose parents were issei living in King County, the heart of the Seattle Japanese population when evacuations began there in 1942, three years before Yamasaki's move to Detroit to work for Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls, the firm that assisted his family to avoid internment. "Public Proclamation 21" went into effect in January of 1945, so by the time Yamasaki moved to Detroit, Japanese-Americans were no longer interred. Source
Who were these architects from Michigan anyway? Why would a Detroit-based firm assist a New-York based architect employed by a different firm? The story itself sounds odd. Why wouldn't Yamasaki's employer in New York help him? Why did Smith, Hinchman & Grylls step up to help? Was this firm like the Schindler of architectural firms?
Furthermore, the Japanese population of the West Coast was generally encouraged to move east, not that folks east of California wanted them, but if Minoru was already in New York, why would he require the help of anyone to move his parents East? How much was bus fare to New York from the slums of Seattle? The more I looked at that narrative, the less sense it made so I started following the only lead I had; Smith, Hinchman & Grylls.
Why is it when researching the WTC, almost everywhere I turn there's a weapons contractor?
During the Great Depression, Smith, Hinchman & Grylls almost went out of business, and during WWII they survived by building ammunition plants for the military:
"They survived the Great Depression with small jobs from existing clients, a major commission in 1935 from the University of Michigan, and, in the late 1930s, new corporate plants and municipal facilities. During World War II they built ammunition plants."
Ah, an architectural firm with ties to the defense industry; that sounds about right. Perhaps I'm getting too paranoid for my own good, but I can't imagine why an architectural firm relying on building government ammunition plants during a time of war with Japan would stick-out their necks for a Japanese-American architect employed by a competitor in another city. Call me crazy, but this story just doesn't flow; even so, the deeper you dig the weirder it gets. It turns out Smith, Hinchman & Grylls were doing more than just building ammunition plants; they were contracted by the Department of War during the site selection process for nuclear weapon production facilities:
"The Director of the Engineering Division, Roger S. Warner, Jr., took the next logical step. He engaged an engineering consulting firm, Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, to make a detailed
comparative survey of Fort Peck and Pocatello. The firm began
work on January 5, 1949, and presented its interim report
exactly one month later, concluding that Pocatello was preferable
on many grounds.
The congressional questioning of the AEC staff responsible
for hiring Smith, Hinchman & Grylls led to a number of
embarrassing revelations about the entire selection process. The
Director of the Engineering Division was criticized for awarding
the contract on the basis of a recommendation by someone from
another agency."
Well that didn't help clear up anything at all. Yamasaki was spared internment by an architectural firm whose bread and butter were the defense industry, and later, during his employment with the firm, they were involved with the mother of all hoaxes, the Manhattan Project. But wait, there's more:
[quote] "The New (CIA) Headquarters Building was designed in the early 1980s by the Detroit architectural and engineering firm of Smith, Hinchman & Grylls."
[/quote] Source
Like a stonemason from the middle ages, Yamasaki appears to have had friends in high places. Even before the creation of the CIA, it is clear somebody up there liked him, and for whatever their reasons, they used their clout to keep his family out of a cage and give him employment in a firm with very strong ties to the military industrial complex. But talk about gratitude! After saving his family's asses, he abandoned Smith, Hinchman & Glylls and opened his own firm in competition and in the same year went on to design the U.S. Consulate in Kobe, Japan, just four years after the end of WWII.
Was he so good that he could land a gig like that in a country the US military had so recently conquered, or was he just that well-connected? I say he was the Company architect, or one of them, and he was not so much good at it as he was good and quiet about it. He would do as he was asked, and not ask questions.
"Minoru Yamasaki will forever be remembered alongside America's most profound architectural disaster. Whatever he was before 2001—which was dead, maligned, and mainly sliding away into obscurity—he is forever after the designer of the most ambitious modern structure ever to end up as a gaping hole."
[/quote] Source
Much has been written about Minoru Yamasaki, and much of it is not flattering. He was not the most respected architect in history by any means, and certainly wasn't considered one at the time he was chosen to design the WTC. Yamasaki and Associates was a relatively unknown firm which once selected raised eyebrows, and not just because of his lack of notoriety. The firm's experience was called into question:
[quote]"Carol Willis, Historian: Yamasaki was a very strange choice for the architect of the world's tallest buildings, because he had never been a commercial architect, and especially of skyscrapers or of high-rises — his previous buildings had been mid-rises of 20 or so stories. He was not one of those architects who was particularly emphatic about a structural engineering solution. One thinks of his earlier work more in a decorative vein. He was interested in the play of light and shadow on the surface of a building. So that his previous buildings seemed almost delicate in scale, and wholly out of proportion to the ambition of the commission of the Trade Center."[/quote] [quote]
"Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic: He felt that sort-of standard issue modern architecture was harsh and unwelcoming and cold. And he wanted to make architecture warm. So he kept doing these buildings that were sort of delicate. A lot of his stuff had these funny little gothic arches and it looked kind of cute, in a weird way."
[/quote] [quote] "Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic: They thought they were actually making kind of a leap to a sort of "high art" architect. Yamasaki was actually a kind of low-end "high art" architect. He was not one of the more admired ones by architectural historians and critics, but he was nonetheless sort of somewhere in the bottom of that group. And this was of course for him the opportunity of a lifetime."
Out of the 12 firms considered, it was Yamasaki's awarded the contract. Why Yamasaki?
"Eric Lipton, New York Times Reporter: They also wanted someone who was not so old and established and also set in his ways that they couldn't, you know, twist his arm and get him to agree to do what they wanted to do. They wanted someone who was creative, but they also wanted someone that was going to listen to Guy Tozzoli and to Austin Tobin. And they got that in Minoru Yamasaki."
[/quote] Source
"Yamasaki's firm was selected for the design of the World Trade Center precisely because he could be counted on to be agreeable, to accommodate the developer's demands. It gave him ulcers, but Yamasaki made real the visions of America's leaders—and left everyone else to suffer the consequences."
Below are some further supporting passages from the book, "Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center", Rutgers University Press (November 1, 1999), Pages 46 and 47:
[quote]"Incidentally, if you're going to build a great project, you should build the world's tallest building." Briefly then, the seed of this ambitious scheme came from neither architectural nor engineering considerations. It was a marketing device to attract tenants. …
…The planners of the trade center were acutely aware that they were doing a new thing, that it was a new idea. Because of its novelty, considerable risk was involved. At stake was the Port Authority's money and the planners' careers. Surprising as it may now seem, at that time in the United States, international trade accounted for less than 3.8 percent of the gross national product. And of that sum, 80 percent was being handled by large multinational corporations, to whom a world trade center meant nothing since they already had well-established international activities. Tozzoli and his planners were worried because they were betting their careers on building this complex as an income-producing entity. This was a task complicated by the fact that they had to follow the rules of the legislation, which specified that at least 75 percent of the tenants had to be either directly involved in international business or in servicing it. Tozzoli recalled, "I came to the conclusion, with Austin, that the only way to achieve that was to build the world's biggest project."…
…Tozzoli thanked the three architects who had been on the study team and let them go. He went on to seek out a new architect a Japanese American named Minoru Yamasaki, born in Seattle."…
…So the Port Authority gave Minoru Yamasaki the program to be accomplished, but left him free on how to render it in space. Thus the actual plan would be left up to the architect, …
[/quote]They were saving the gig for him, that's some pretty heady stuff, plus, they were building the towers as a marketing gimmick, and they were fine with whatever design he came up with as long as it met the Port Authority's guidelines. The rest was up to the quiet, unassuming Japanese guy from Seattle.
Well were his buildings any good? Sure, but not all of them. It turns out his buildings were no strangers to disaster; as of last count, three of his projects were destroyed by explosives and/or fire.
The Pruitt-Igoe Houses project in St. Louis, Missouri was hated so badly it had to be dynamited, but what I consider the crème de la crème is the National Personnel Records Center in Overland, Missouri. This huge concrete building was built to house the personnel records of much of the Army and Air Force. Paper records for the Military. The building was constructed per the client's wishes without a fire extinguisher system. No sprinklers in the hall of records and you guessed it, *poof* up in flames after multiple arson attempts, incinerating decades' of military records in the process.
"A building commissioned in 1951 by the Department of Defense was built without a sprinkler system, and then burned in a spectacular fire. That building, the U.S. Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, housed 38 million individual service records and 4,000 employees. When it was completed in 1956, the six-story concrete and aluminum behemoth was one of the twenty largest buildings in the world.
Less than twenty years later, in July 1973, a fire tore through the building, burning out of control for more than two days. It was the weekend of the official end of the draft, and the news was all bombs and impeachment. Over the previous two years, the Records Center had reported a dozen small fires, all started intentionally. This one, set shortly after midnight on July 12, appeared to be another case of arson. No one died in the blaze, set when only 50 employees were on duty, but sixteen to eighteen million military personnel files, many of them irreplaceable, were lost. Today, the Personnel Records Center informs those seeking information that, as a result of the fire, it cannot provide access to 80 percent of army files on personnel discharged between 1912 and 1960, as well as 75 percent of air force personnel discharged between 1947 and 1964. Information about hundreds of thousands of veterans vanished from the face of the earth."
[/quote]Architects have always played a major role in the shaping of civilizations, just ask the Freemasons. Minoru Yamasaki designed castles for modern royalty, and for better or worse his work profoundly shaped what passes for civilization today. Was he a spy? I don't know, but if he wasn't he must surely have been surrounded by them.
Yamasaki was right there at the beginning and the end of it all; the beginning and end of the war with Japan, the beginning of the covert colonization of the Middle East, the beginning of the CIA and the start of the Cold War.
The New World Order needs its architects, after all.
Here's to Minoru Yamasaki; a guy who helped build the props used to fool the world. Again.
Below is a partial list of his work:
National Personnel Records Center in Overland, Missouri
Commissioned: 1951
Completed: 1955
Overcome by fire 12 July 1973
Employees: 4,000
Acreage: nearly 5
Pruitt-Igoe Houses, St. Louis, Missouri
Commissioned: 1951
Completed: 1954
Dynamited 15 July 1972
Capacity: 12,000 residents
Acreage: 55 acres (34 still vacant)
World Trade Center, New York, New York
Commissioned: 1962
Completed: 1976
Bombed from parking garage 26 February 1993
Casualties: 6
Hit by airplanes 11 September 2001
Casualties: 2,823
Workers: 50,000
Acreage: 16 acres, redevelopment to be determined
Urban Redevelopment Plan, St. Louis, 1952
Gratiot Urban Redevelopment Project, Detroit, 1954
University School, Grosse Pointe, 1954
U.S. Consulate, Kobe, Japan, 1955
Pruit-Igoe Public Housing, St. Louis, 1955
Lambert-St.Louis Airport Terminal, 1956
McGregor Memorial Conference Center, Wayne State University, Detroit, 1958
Reynolds Metals Regional Sales Office, Southfield, 1959
Michigan Consolidated Gas Co., Detroit, 1963
U.S. Pavilion, World Agricultural Fair, New Delhi, India, 1959
Dhahran Air Terminal, Dhahran Saudi Arabia, 1961
Federal Science Pavilion, Seattle World's Fair, 1962
Queen Emma Gardens, Honolulu, 1964
North Shore Congregation Israel, Glenco, Ill., 1964
Northwestern National Life Insurance Co., Minneapolis, 1964
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 1965
Century Plaza Hotel, Los Angeles, 1966
IBM Office Building, Seattle, 1964
Manufacturers and Traders Trust Co., Buffalo, 1967
World Trade Center, New York, 1976
Eastern Airlines Terminal, Logan International Airport, Boston, 1969
Horace Mann Educators Insurance Co., Springfield, Ill., 1979
Temple Beth El, Birmingham, 1974
Century Plaza Towers, Los Angeles, 1975
Colorado National Bank, Denver, 1974
Bank of Oklahoma, Tulsa, 1977
Performing Arts Center, Tulsa, 1976
Rainer Bank Tower, Seattle, 1977
Federal Reserve Bank, Richmond, Va., 1978
Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency Head Office, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 1981
Founder's Hall, Shinji Shumeikai, Shiga Prefecture, Japan, 1982
Eastern Province International Airport, Saudi Arabia, 1985
ATTENTION: With an advertising budget of zero dollars we ask everyone who has websites and blogs to copy and paste these links into them as a directory, to help spread the word! Thanks!
- Deanna Spingola, Larry McWilliams, Phil Jayhan – 911 Media Deception – part 1
- Deanna Spingola, Larry McWilliams, Phil Jayhan – 911 Media Deception – part 2
- Part 1 -Deanna Spingola – The Debris Pile of 9/11, Hollow Towers & Missing Contents
- Part 2 -Deanna Spingola – The Debris Pile of 9/11, Hollow Towers & Missing Victims
- #1: Securing Liberty/Deb Lewis: Missing Contents WTC & Hollow Towers
- #2: Securing Liberty/Deb Lewis: Missing Contents WTC & Hollow Towers
- The Last American Radio Broadcast – With Phil Jayhan & Larry McWilliams
- 2 HR. Show: The Hollow Towers & Mechanized Lighting System @ WTC
- #1: Jim Fetzer: Phil Jayhan & Larry McWilliams -Hollow Towers & Missing Contents WTC
- #2: Jim Fetzer, Larry McWilliams & Phil Jayhan – The Hollow Towers & Fake Victims
- 911 Hollow Towers Radio Show – YouTube
*** IMPORTANT: Please use this link below for visual aids while listening to the interviews;
The 9/11 FraudulentTruth Movement: A Conspiracy 30+ Years in the Making
- The 9/11 Truth Movement – 30 Year Conspiracy Inside a Conspiracy
- MEMO: The "911 Truth Movement," truth, movement and 911…
- William Rodriguez – Deconstructing a Narcissistic Fraudulent Super-Hero
Fraudulent Hero's of 9/11
- PRESS RELEASE: William Rodriguez – Last Man Out: 9/11 Fraud!
- Willie Rodriguez – Deposition – Whats wrong with this video?
- William Rodriguez – Deconstructing a Narcissistic Fraudulent Super-Hero
- William Rodriguez X-Hero, 911 Conspirator Quotes:
- The Willie Rodriguez Super Hero Video Thread
9/11 World Trade Center Props
- Hummers, Bummers, and the 9/11 Media Deception
- The World Trade Center – Fake Smoke Piping & Delivery System Installed!
- North Tower Fake Airplane hole possible Smoke Machine
- Revisiting "Modern Marvels", pre 9/11 WTC propaganda with the hollow towers in mind
- Why was the World Trade Center giving off White Smoke on 9/11?
- Did the WTC have a Fake Interior Lighting & Shuttering System to Cloak the Interior?
- VIDEOS: Essential Prep for Controlled Demo – Did we Miss Anything?
- Movie Sets and Controlled Demolitions— CDI and Lethal Weapon 3
- Is this a massive smoke machine?
- The Reconfigured World Trade Center Picture Thread
- A Simple Mathematical Proof of Missing Floors at the World Trade Center
- The Reconfigured World Trade Center Picture Thread
- Early tale to go along with the fake smoke picture
- Another Bent Sign 9/11 Stage Prop
- Fake fire, smoke and firesticks from a distance
- New York Times: A Brief History of Photo Fakery
- 9/11 Audio/Visual Simulation
- Fox News Nov. 13, 2010 report on Building 7. Unprecedented
- Is it Live or is it Hollywood? 911 Hollywood Fakery –
- Fake fire, smoke and firesticks from a distance @ WTC 9/11
- Another Very Fake 911 Photograph – But the Paper is Real!
World Trade Center Publicity Stunts:
Exif/IPTC Metadata:
Video: Fraudulence on 9/11
- 9/11 Plane-witness accounts
- Another gem in the NIST release…"The man standing in the air"
- 9/11 Video Deception by News Media
Death Certificate #0001:
- The Strange Story of Father Mychal Judge: Death Certificate # 0001 on 9/11
- New York City – Death Certificates Issued – Various sources;
Social Security Death Payments & Other SSDI Related Evidence
The Hollow Towers & Pre-Demolition of WTC:
- Take the WTC "Where's the Concrete?" Challenge Thread
- Did the World Trade Center have an Interior Lighting & Shuttering System Installed?
- The Hollow WTC Towers & the Pre-Demolition of the World Trade Center:
- Radio Show MP3 on the Hollow Towers & Missing Contents of WTC
- Why are all the Lights off throughout the WTC on 9/11?
- The Dust Cloud Trick – Explanation for Lack of Items and Body Parts
- The Conspicuous Absence of Jewelry in the WTC rubble pile
- The World Trade Center – Fake Smoke Piping & Delivery System Installed!
- A Simple Mathematical Proof of Missing Floors at the World Trade Center
- Revisiting "Modern Marvels", pre 9/11 WTC propaganda with the hollow towers in mind
The World Trade Center Lighting & Picture History:
- Did the WTC have a Fake Interior Lighting & Shuttering System to Cloak the Interior?
- The World Trade Center Picture History Thread
- Why are all the Lights off throughout the WTC on 9/11?
- New Witness to the No Power Statement comes forward (Debunked)
- The Reconfigured World Trade Center Picture Thread
The Elevators at WTC on 9/11 and the Trapped People:
- Outrageous WTC 9/11 elevator stories exposed
- 1993 World Trade Center Bombing – Whats wrong with this Picture?
Revisiting the World Trade Center Phone Calls:
Fireman Actors on 9/11:
- Fireman Joe Casaliggi: Professional Actor – Also on 9/11?
- Revisited: Thursday, September 11, 2008 9-11 Firemen deaths and WTC radio problems
New York City Fire Department 9/11 Fraudulent Victims
- What Happened To The 9/11 Firemen? The "Missing 347 FDNY?"
- 9/11 TV Fakery-The Lying Firefighters!
- Where Were The Firemen Who Belong to These Destroyed Fire Engines?
- FDNY Fireman Selling Silly Idea WTC and People Turned to Dust!
- What is Wrong with the Battalion 12 Story?
- 9/11 FDNY & The Shame of Ladders 1, 8, and 10
- The real RUDY!?
- More 911 lies & Fraud: 9/11: After the Towers Fell – Ominous Sound
- #1 Death Recorded on 911: Strange Mysteries – Father Judge's Death
- 9/11 FDNY Fraud: Stephen G. Harrell
- Manuel Delvalle—The Lone Lost Man From Engine 5
- Assistant Chief Gerard A. Barbara
- Fraud: Robert Cordice – Missing 9/11 Fireman
Stand In Actors on 9/11:
- 9/11 WTC Actors Master thread, videos of obvious actors in NYC (
- New Witness to the No Power Statement comes forward (Debunked)
- 9/11 Witness can't remember where he works, another thinks its all a huge joke!
- Actors of 9/11 – Can you Spot them?
- 9/11 Survivor Stories
- WTC witness, Bill Heitman, WABC, Another 9/11 FRAUD!
Flight 11 Frauds:
- 9/11 Passenger Mystery Unraveling? Is Mike Rivero, John Wenckus of Flight 11?
- Ex Disney Executive – Carolyn Mayer-Beug; Passenger on Flight 11? Or 9/11 Planner?
- 911 Actors? Flight 11 & 175: The Strange Tale of Ruth McCourt & Paige Hackel –
- Passenger Fl# 11: Sonia Morales Puopolo's – Clinton/Kerry Tied to 9/11 thru Sonia
- ISRAELI SPECIAL FORCES: Daniel Lewin – Alleged 9/11 Passenger – Obit Created 9.11.01?
- Passenger Flight 11 -Laura Lee Morabito- Another Super Wedding Ring Story
- 9/11 Conspirator? Was Ari Fleischers picture used for a Passenger of Fl# 11?
- Fl# 11 Fraud: – Judith Camilla Larocque Frankel – Member of CFR
- Flight 11 Fraud: – Jeff Mladenik – Pastor – CEO of Elogic – Exif Data 9.12.2001
- David Angell and Lynn Angell
Flight 175 Frauds:
- Flight 175 Fraud: Timothy Ward – Exif Data 01.11.2000
- Video Fakery "Ringer" Among the Passengers: Douglas A. Gowell
- 911 Actors? Flight 11 & 175: The Strange Tale of Ruth McCourt & Paige Hackel
- Triplets Separated at Birth – Edward H. Luckett, Carlton Bartels, Michael Tarrou
Flight 77 Frauds:
- BARBARA OLSON – 9/11 FRAUD? Is Lady Booth Really Barbara Olson with Plastic Surgery?
- Flight 77 Fraud: Dora Menchaca – Exif/IPTC data of 9/8/2001 & Impossible Story
Flight 93 Frauds:
- Ceecee Lyles, Exif Data, Drivers Liscense Issues, Address Issues
- Mark Bingham – Exif/IPTC Data 8/30/2001 – 13 Days before 9/11!
- Alan Beaven – The Singing "Flight 93 Hero" hits a Low Note
- Todd Beamer 9/11 Victim: Wrong Photo Date in Rome!
- Financial Fraud: 9/11 Widow Lisa Beamer
- Todd Beamer Flight 93 9/11 Victim: Boss Announces Todd is a Hero Too Early!
- Flight 93 Shanksville Crash Site Photos – Some New Ones
- 9/11 Victim Flight 93: John Talignani – Wrong Address on Driver's License
- Out of Respect for the 9/11 Victims Family Members & Friends
- 9/11 Conspiracy: Strange Connections Between Todd Beamer and Mark Bingham (United 93)
The 911 Jumper Frauds:
- 9/11 Jumpers Video's – Observations & Critical Thinking
- Lady in WTC Window Wearing Safety Harness?
- Did Gelitin the B thing Create the 9/11 Jumper Fraud? Pre 911 Intrigue – Gelatin – The B-Thing
- Jumper And Ground Images
- WARNING: GRAPHIC DISTURBING IMAGE – Can anyone Identify this 9/11 Jumper?
- 9/11 Video Guy who filmed the Jumpers – His Testimony
- Edna Cintron, The Waving Woman, 911 Hoax
- Gwendolyn Briley-Strand- Admitted 911 Actor!
- The Floating Man – Real, Dummy or CGI?
- What are we to make of the sound of the Jumpers hitting in Naudet bro's documentary?
North Tower Frauds:
- PRESS RELEASE: A Tribute to Harry John Roland – The "First 911 Fraud!"
- George Sleigh 911 Survivor, Another Tall Tale from the 91st Floor
- 9/11 Fraud? David H. Rice – Alleged 9/11 WTC Victim – Obit created on 9/11/2001?
- INGEBORG LARIBY: key figure in the simulated 911 victims fraud
- Triplets Separated at Birth – Edward Luckett, Carlton Bartel, Michael Tarrou
- Edna Cintron, The Waving Woman, 911 Hoax
- Gwendolyn Briley-Strand- Admitted 911 Actor!
- 9/11 Actress? Rachel Uchitel – Former Girlfriend of Tiger Woods
- An Examination of the E-Team artist's in the WTC
Pentagon Stage Props – Pentagon TV Fakery:
- Fake Smoke Machines at the Pentagon on 9/11
- What's Wrong With This Pentagon Picture? Fake Smoke, Fake Fire…
Pentagon Fraudulent Victims on 9/11:
- Pentagon File: Max Beilke: Exif Data – Pentagon Brief Release – 2/15/2000
- Pentagon NO fatalities NO dead passengers?
Media Complicity and Fraud:
- Intelligence Agencies Run All Media Outlets
- NY Times Story Fraud? Writers & Creators of the 911 "Victims Sketches"
- CARMEN TAYLOR & MEDIA COMPLICITY on 9/11
- EXPOSED: The 9/11 Fraud – Tania Head -World Trade Center
- Who Is 911 Families for a Strong and Safe America?
- Digital Computer Recreation of 9/11 WTC Plane Impact | TV Fakery
- Gwendolyn Briley-Strand- Admitted 911 Actor!
Media 9/11 Memorial Frauds:
- 911 – Disturbing/Photoshopped Victim Picture of the Day
- 9/11 Victims Pictures – Anyone Look Familiar?
- OUR SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 BROTHAS & SISTAS Victims – NY 9-11 Blacks
- Gwendolyn Briley-Strand- Admitted 911 Actor!
The 9/11 Memorial Wall:
9/11 & WTC Corporate Fraud:
- 911Blogger; Dump Trucks Ready on 9/11/01 to Cart off Evidence
- The Rand Corporation and Their Report on the Victim's Compensation Fund
- Price Waterhouse Coopers – Were they part of the 911 Plot? Flight 11 & 175 Passengers
- Zim Shipping and the 9/11 connection
- Were Specific Company's at the World Trade Center Targeted On 9/11!
- Cantor Fitzgerald – Edward H. Luckett, Carlton Bartel, Michael Tarrou
- Identical/similar surnames of employees allegedly working at Cantor Fitzgerald.
Gatekeepers of the Alternate Media:
Pending Research Requests from Lets Roll Members:
- Has anyone seen a Video of People Exiting the World Trade Center?
- Need some help….Victims from Germany? Where are they?
- Exploring Possibilities for Constructing the Victims–How Many Types Were There?
- Research Request: Real Estate Displacement Statistics post 9/11 in Lower Manhattan
- Important Research Request; Pictures of the Fire at N&S Towers
MISC: Great Research Links on this Material above:
- TV Archive – High Quality 911 TV Footage – Archived
- Nist releases thousands vids and pictures
- Two Jeremy Glick's on 9/11?
- Who Is 911 Families for a Strong and Safe America?
- Irrefutable 9/11 Video PROOF of WTC Controlled Demolition
- 9/11 WTC Actors Master thread, videos of obvious actors in NYC (
- Why are all the Lights off throughout the WTC on 9/11?
- The World Trade Center – Amazing Facts & Figures
- 48 Millionaires on the 4 Flights of 9/11 and STILL counting!
- Mike Rivero Links to LetsRoll Forums!
- Funnin at the studios on 911
- Were Specific Company's at the World Trade Center Targeted On 9/11!
- HEROISM AND HORROR – 9/11 Book Excerpts
- Has anyone seen a Video of People Exiting the World Trade Center?
- The World Trade Center Picture History Thread
- Remains of 72 people found at World Trade Center site
- TV Celebrity Face-off – Can you identify this TV personality?
- Question of the Day: Ari Fleischer, Flight 11 & Box Cutters
- Interesting IP's Visiting LetsRollForums.com & LetsRoll911.org
- Exploring Possibilities for Constructing the Victims–How Many Types Were There?
- Would You Believe This? F-18 Smashes into World Trade Center after being Hijacked!
- The Hollow Towers, Reality Shack Forum & Simon Shack
- Jason Burmas On Fake 9/11 Victims (gatekeeper)!
Former Stickies for the Hussled Masses:
- Pictures of Extra Equipment on Look-A-Like Flight 175 (109,720 Views)
- 911 For Dummies Thread. Video, Picture Archive of 911 (7,513,922 Views)
- Targeting Laser Light Spot at the World Trade Center! (121,515 Views)
- "Flight 175" WAS a Cargo/FUEL TANKER (159,126 Views)
- New Photo of 767 Showing 2nd Piece of Equip / Port Engine (233,137 Views)
- 9/11 LINKS INDEX – Victim Fraud, Media Fraud, WTC Fraud
9/11 Related Murders:
Directory of Organized Crime Links & 9/11 Ties
- Rudi Giuliani, 9/11 and the Gotham City Mafia Connection
- Last Days of the Gotti Gang & Building the 911 World Trade Center Stage
- How did 250 tons of World Trade Center Steel end up in Mafia Hands?
- Italian Organized Crime in America & Abroad – Overview
- Daily News probe finds WTC contractors with mob ties, fraud
- Organized Crime Ties & Contracts for building New World Trace Center
Osama Bin Laden Forum directory:
- Bin Laden Construction worked on the World Trade Center?
- He's coming to get you: The day Osama Bin Laden sat glued watching TV of Barack Obama
- Obama's secret note to General Wilson
- Purpose of this new Osama Bin Laden forum
- Osama Watches Himself on TV in Pakistan Home
- Osama home video.
- Cool Stealth Helicopter
- CIA transcript of Bin Ladin's own words from a decade ago tell a different Story.
- OSAMA'S BODY.. Because the General Public Willl Believe Anything
- Osama Hit – How It Went Down and What It Could Mean
- Al-Qaeda confirms Bin Laden is dead
- Am I supposed to be happy Osama is dead?
- No More Crazy Conspiracy Theories
- Another Glaring Problem with Obama's Birth Certificate.
- Proof that Obama is a Puppet
- Bin Laden Assassination An Occult Ritual On May Day?
- Bin Laden Kill: Why now?
- No Osama killed pictures? No dead Osama!
- Obama refuses to release Bin Laden death photos –
- Who Was Osama Bin Laden?
- More MSM fear mongering just to remind us that the terror threat hasn't gone away.
- Who Was Osama Bin Laden?
- OBL Killed in May Day Blaze of Glory? Don't you believe it.
- Osama's dead! Let's party!
- Burials at sea against Islamic rules.
- Bin Laden Died In December 2001
- 6 days ago… Wikileaks said Al-Qaeda has hidden a nuclear bomb in Europe.
- Moments before Obama announced Osama was dead…
- Bin Laden's Corpse Photo?

subset: commoncrawl


text:
D@Top necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 115 diseños de 17 diseñadores freelance.
Advantive Information Management
Advantive Information Management, the prospective parent firm, is headlined by http://www.toplinestrategies.com
In brief, Advantive Information Management is looking at a combination with R2. R2 is an advanced data backup and recovery solution for critical mission computing .environments, such as production/manufacturing facilities. This logo is for Advantive Information Management, with a mostly R2 focus.
R2 Software AS was founded in 2002 by two developers, who were frustrated with both the quality and price of existing back-up & recovery software. Through their business network, they knew that especially mid to large size manufacturing companies have a real challenge supporting the typical mix of platforms that such companies have in their manufacturing environment — where manufacturing machines are operating on systems ranging from DOS to the latest version of Windows.
So they set out on a mission: To develop the best possible "all-in-one" solution, where rapid recovery and restoration across any platform was second-to-none. In 2004 they launched their first commercial version of the R2 software, and with the installation of the system on 3000 clients (machines, robots etc) at one of Denmark's largest industrial companies.
The logo persona should be:
- Cutting edge
- Technologically advanced
- Highly professional
- Strong and sophisticated
- Decision makers for mid to large size businesses
- Typically IT, HR, and Marketing department heads
- Well educated (4 – 6 years post secondary education)
- Male and Female
- Between 35 and 60 years of age
- Insurance
- Software Development
- Healthcare
- Education
- Gaming
- Reliability
- Stability
- Security
- Elegance
- Strength
- Ostentatiousness
- Lack of substance
- Fluff
- Inconsistency
- Clear fonts (sans serif), Clear symbols
- Simplicity
- Originality
Graphic and File Requirements:
- Colors: see design guide of TLS
- Logo on transparent and color background
--Logo with tagline on transparent and color background:
- Icon only on transparent and color background
- Must provide font names, sizes, and manipulation detail for any/all that are provided in outline form.
- Graphics must be provided in resizable and adaptable vector form – Illustrator or EPS only.
- Submit complete logo with greeked tagline on transparent and color background after having received a 4 star rating.
- Please be advised that we reserve the right change the selected logo(s) in any way we deem necessary.
Don't Wants
Don't Want
- No cheesy/cartoonish graphics
- No recycled logos
- Bold, heavy fonts
- No deco
- Nothing trendy
For the most part, follow the TopLine Strategies style guide, and use TopLine Strategies colors. Something that echos the TopLine Strategies logo (see http://www.toplinestrategies.com) would likely be well received.
At least one version of the delivered logo must match exactly or closely the size of a related logo here http://www.toplinestrategies.com/si…e/logo.png, so we can the new one into that same drupal template, which is shown is this example here http://www.toplinestrategies.com/approach.
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.