In the summer of 2017, Hazim Nada, a thirty-four-year-old American living in Como, Italy, received an automated text message from his mobile phone carrier: How was our customer service? Puzzled, he called a friend at the company. Someone impersonating Nada had obtained copies of his call history. A few weeks later, his account manager at Credit Suisse alerted him that an impostor who sounded nothing like Nada—he has a slightly nasal, almost childlike voice—had phoned and asked for banking details. “I started to feel like somebody was trying to scam me,” Nada told me.
Nada was the founder of a nine-year-old commodities-trading business, Lord Energy. The “Lord” stood for “liquid or dry,” because the company shipped both crude oil and such drygoods as cement and corn. He had carved out a lucrative niche by establishing unconventional routes: Libya to Korea, Gabon to Italy. By the summer of 2017, Lord Energy, which was based in Lugano, a Swiss city across the border from Como, had a satellite office in Singapore, another opening in Houston, and annual revenue approaching two billion dollars.
Denne historien er fra April 03, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra April 03, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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NOTE TO SELVES
The Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the southwestern United States, is a vast expanse of arid earth where cartoonish entities-roadrunners, tumbleweeds, telephone-pole-tall succulents make occasional appearances.
THE ORCHESTRA IS THE STAR
The Berlin Philharmonic doesn't need a domineering maestro.
HEAD CASE
Paul Valéry's ascetic modernism.
LOVE FOR SALE
When America tried to get on top of the sex trade.
EACH OTHER'S BACK
\"Nickel Boys.\"
NO ROOM FOR A MASTERPIECE
Rashid Johnson's art of masculine vulnerability is going to the Guggenheim.
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President Emmanuel Macron has plunged the country into chaos.
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Recently refurbished houseboat. Sleeps four guests comfortably, and many more less comfortably, but it's definitely doable and safe, though no jumping all at once, please.
LEG WORK
A surgeon and an engineer reimagine the prosthetic limb.
BASIC INSTINCT
A feminist director takes on the erotic thriller.