Friends With A Fraudster: Remembering The Real Larry Greenfield
You should always ask how someone pays their bills. They might be a criminal. Or a spy. Or both.
Larry Greenfield was my friend in the way you see people around are. He was superficial without being unctuous or revealing much of anything about himself.
He was warm, generous, and odd in an avuncular kind of way. He went around picking up tabs and it was very unclear how he paid his bills. Was it with some think tank’s cash? Or his own? Or someone else’s altogether? Who knew and in those impoverished days, who cared?
He would ask you questions about your own life and one time he even spoke to a gathering of college conservatives I attended.
Larry was also very evidently a serial fraudster with strong ties to far-right (really Russian aligned) Israelis and even the guest of a Turkish sex cult leader. Really. (More on that in a moment.)
Larry took his own life. Whether it was a forced suicide or not even a suicide at all, I couldn’t say but it is the case that he was under investigation by Israeli and American law enforcement for helping his brother run one of the largest Ponzi schemes in Israeli history. I note only that he died in Las Vegas and as everyone knows what happens in Vegas stays there. How are we doing discovering a motive for that shooting anyway? Or have we forgotten altogether?
Larry’s brother is now a fugitive in what we once might have called the former Soviet bloc doing God knows what. I suspect Interpol will be out looking for him if they aren’t already. Whether they find him or not will tell whether this is a spy thing or a crook thing.
You won’t read that in any of the hagiographic paeans to his life. You’ll see that he was a “strong conservative" and a “great patriot” who loves Ronald Reagan. OK then! Don’t ask any questions, okay?! My favorite of this “don’t look too closely” strategy comes from none other than Eric Golub, who describes himself as Larry’s brother though they are not related.
Sorry but we ask questions round here.
Like what was Larry doing with the Turkish sex cult leader who wound up getting sentenced to over a 1000 years in prison? That’s a thousand, dear reader.
Just look at these photos.
“Adnan Oktar was sentenced to 1,075 years for crimes including sexual assault, sexual abuse of minors, fraud and attempted political and military espionage,” says the Guardian.
Horrifyingly Larry one time wanted me to give him research I had done on elected California officials. He claimed he wanted to run for California comptroller because “that’s where the money is.”
I demurred, unclear as to who was actually paying for the research. Larry was all smiles but when I refused he got very mad with me and threatened me. I said I’d be happy to refer him to another researcher. That was the last time we ever spoke one on one. I’d see him around and he’d act as if nothing happened. Again, Larry was all smiles. It was weird and it creeped me out but there’s a lot of creepy weird stuff that happens in Republican politics and I pushed it out of my mind.
Much will be made of Larry’s supposed ties to the Claremont Institute but I knew Larry during his time “working” there and it’s pretty clear that Brian T. Kennedy, the Institute’s then president let Larry go almost as soon as he had hired him. I don’t know if Kennedy chose to let Larry keep his title until he found another job but it was something he milked for years and years after his de facto firing.
I’ve broken with the Claremont Institute — I didn’t care for Michael Pack’s tenure (I opposed him for Voice of America) and the #War language makes me very uncomfortable. Luckily the intemperate bordering on seditious behavior of senior fellow John Eastman is getting all the federal attention he so richly deserves.
No, I don’t think highly of Claremont these days and I think some of them have even been treasonous. The feeling, I’m told, is mutual. Good. Let there be clarity about who sits where and who they really serve.
This realization that some of my erstwhile friends have sold out the country has been painful to admit given how much of my twenties I spent cultivating their approval and how many Claremont people I helped get jobs in the Trump Administration.
Add it to the tally of my misspent youth. Oh how I miss my twenties. I was more or less informed that notwithstanding my help I was persona non grata because, well, of my Google results, so I stopped attending Claremont events. I’d prefer it if they removed me from the website and if I am especially naughty they may well.
Naturally Larry was celebrated by Claremont, even as recently as October 2020.
And by the Republican Jewish Coalition’s executive director Matt Brooks:
We are deeply saddened by the passing of Larry Greenfield, a patriot who loved America and loved Israel. He was a deeply knowledgeable, eloquent, and dedicated Jewish Republican activist. Larry had a big impact on shaping the critical debates facing our country. We are grateful for Larry’s time at the RJC. As our regional director in California, he built a strong network of grassroots members and leaders who are the foundation of our success on the West Coast until today. His passing is a loss to our community and to our nation. May his memory be a blessing.
“May the memory of his Ponzi schemes inspire generations of Jewish and Israeli criminals,” he added. I’m just kidding. He didn’t add that but he should have.
In the spirit of full disclosure Brooks and I don’t like one another all that much. In fact, I’m convinced that the RJC has its own criminal ties. Brooks came after me after I visited Julian Assange (at the direction of the U.S. government) and he called me a Holocaust denier for working on shutting down Russian operations on Reddit. We aren’t fans of one another and last I saw him he quickly scuttled away.
In any event Larry was happy to go work for Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs (JINSA) after Claremont.
JINSA’s the same outfit where Nathan Reiber worked.
He was most proud of his involvement with the think tank, Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs "JINSA" where he served as the National Executive Vice President. During his term, he addressed NATO and met with world leaders from Spain, Hungary, Germany, Ethiopia and Uzbekistan discussing issues of world security and defense.
You might recall Reiber from another place. He was the criminal developer who scrimped on safety and killed all those people at Champlain Towers South but hey, at least he got to be a big shot at JINSA.
But Larry didn’t last long at JINSA suggesting that JINSA knew what he and his brother were up to. Did they tip off American law enforcement? Hard to say. It doesn’t look like it. With “great allies” like this, though, who really needs enemies?
Larry didn’t seemed terribly bothered about getting the boot twice in a row. He told me that he was going to go work with his brother in Israel the one and only time he mentioned him. He also wanted to be very rich. At the time I admired his optimism. Here was a man who didn’t let the little things (or the big ones!) get him down. How silly of me.
Was Larry a spy or a criminal or a criminal spy? It’s very hard to say and that, I think, is by design.
Recall that Jeffrey Epstein was once upon a time running a Ponzi scheme and that the ties between Bernie Madoff and the Southern Poverty Law Center and Israel have been underexplored to put it mildly. Maybe the new management at SPLC can look into that? I’m dying to know. In any event there’s something very Russian about all this sort of thing but who knows for sure? The target of “fellow” Jews suggests that this is once again a Likud operation, tied in as they are with Russian organized crime.
Some spies call this “living off the land” and some intelligence agencies actually require their operatives to run these kind of schemes on unsuspecting people. One of the underreported things about Ponzi schemes is that many of their “victims” are in fact well aware of the Ponzi scheme architect’s misbehavior but they simply want to wash bad money and make it good before the redemptions implode the whole thing. Note, for example, that Renaissance Technology seems to have noticed that Madoff was running his Ponzi Scheme as early as 2003. Is RenTec actually a front for the Russians? Of course it is. But you didn’t hear it from me. In the end you always run out of other people’s money.
How much of this stuff is going on? I suspect no one really knows. But I’ve come to believe that the most rational thing to do is to actually cause fights between the rival spies here in the United States. Wars between these factions reveal quite a bit about those how groups actually work and they often make mistakes. I’ve provoked a few fights myself. See if you’ve noticed. They sure have.
What we do know is that many of these conservative outfits have been penetrated by foreign actors and that there has been no real effort to stop this from happening in the future.
Now Larry would not be the first spy to fall into the orbit of the Claremont Institute. That distinction falls, I think, to Ben Tang, though I suppose it depends on your definition of what a spy is. Tang became a fellow way back in the early 1990s.
But recently The Wall Street Journal revealed that Ben Tang (pictured below at right) had strong ties to Chinese intelligence.
Whatever the case there’s a strong necessity for counterintelligence products for even routine groups and behooves everyone to make sure that these spies aren’t allowed in on our American organizations. That isn’t very America First now is it?
Say, what exactly is Jack Murphy a.k.a. John Goldman anyway? He’s a Claremont fellow but who does he really serve? The tell is the gauging of the charter school system..
Finally I’m often criticized for being anti-Israel but I welcome the contributions of the Israelis in finally apprehending these criminals. Having been a target of the Likud criminal wing I look forward to working with the Israeli professionals.
I think the recent move against Israeli criminals during the prime ministership of Naftali Bennett is a welcome sign that Israel has decided to join the community of nations. Good. Now let’s clean up the mess together.
I don’t think it a coincidence that Greenfield wrote about his closeness to mobster Sheldon Adelson or his fondness for Meyer Lansky, a so-called “tough Jew.” There’s nothing tough about targeting the weak and innocent.
We need more menschs and fewer mobsters.
Cheers to you, Prime Minister Bennett, and to President Biden who no doubt is doing his part to rid the world of organized criminality.
Now about that Occupation…