Grubstakers - Episode 158: Joe Lewis

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Enter Joe Lewis: reclusive restaurateur-turned super villain currency speculator. Joe Lewis (the businessman; not the boxer) made billions betting against sovereign currencies, and nearly lost a billion betting on Bear Stearns. Now he wants to setup his own State in Argentina. In order to stop Joe, first get to know him and the empire he has built up, right here on Grubstakers.

We'll be right back. I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about. We are more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Come, invention, come. You want me to do it? Come. You do it, you do it. All right. In five, four, three, two, the evil has gone.

Welcome back to Grubstakers, everyone. I'm Steve Jeffries, and I'm joined as always by my co-hosts. Andy Pollner. Sean P. McCarthy. Yogi Poliwal. Today we're covering Joe Lewis, not the boxer, but the businessman. He's one of the lesser known sort of reclusive billionaires british billionaires you might never hear about in the press but that's kind of a shame that you

don't because he's actually incredibly dangerous and um quite profligate in his spending and he's certainly not benign or harmless which a lot of like the these glowing um interviews online that we could find make him out to be he should be notorious in sort of a household name and perhaps he is in his native britain i mean the uk listeners can fill us in on that point i'm sure they generally have a better understanding of him than the rest of our listeners. Well, I would just say, having looked at a couple, you know, British tabloid articles about him, the main complaint seems to be like, oh, I wish that cunt would spend more money on those fucking spurs. He's recently pissed off, and the reason we're covering him

is that he recently pissed off the fans, the totem hot spurs uh by trying despite being worth 4.3 billion dollars he tried to furlough uh a bunch of the employees and we'll get back to that in a bit but um yeah apparently people in britain are fairly well aware of his wealth and are fairly pissed off at how he's running his football club we'll get to all this in a minute but i just wanted to say up top you know i looked at the sun and a couple other british tabloids and yeah that's the main complaint is that he's like not funding the spurs enough but uh meanwhile if you do a little more digging you find out this guy is building fucking shadow moses in argentina he has his own little private uh military base

in argentina and is uh stealing land and resources and water from the locals so uh he's a pretty scary bad guy yeah i would say so and like in addition to like, you know, the coronavirus thing and his real estate projects, like basically just like enclosing natural resources in Argentina, they'll get into, he, his private equity fund, Tavistock Group, it owns tons of real estate all over the world and it's been responsible for some pretty reckless um speculation particularly in currency markets um along with george soros uh he made a tremendous amount of money like some say just as much as soros so a billion dollars off of essentially betting against the British

pound and betting that they would crash out of the precursor to the European exchange rate mechanism, which we'll explain. Right. The United States has George Soros. The UK has this man, Joe Lewis, similar to how the English viewers know Ricky Gervais to be the office. But in the U.S., we have Steve Carell as our office. Similar, but not the same. They occupy similar positions in the public imagination as far as like private equity billionaires go.

The one managed to, like they both made a billion dollars off the currency exchange, but only one of them managed to blow a billion in Bear Stearns. Just sucking up Bear Stearns equity right up to the very end. True. But also, only one of them seems to be friends with Tiger Woods, Shaquille O'Neal, and belong to the same country club as Ken Griffey Jr., the kid. So Joe Lewis is worth about $4.8 billion, according to Forbes, as of April of this year. And he's nicknamed the boxer simply for sharing the name with the American boxer Joe Lewis,

which just seems like an insult because he's like this like short guy who's like been fat his whole life basically rather than rather than athlete so i will say if you're a billionaire who lives in uh panama uh it's very convenient to have that name because every time you try to uh research the tax troubles that this billionaire was into you get uh the tax troubles of the boxer and how he was hounded by the irs well it's funny there's um joe lewis is a land of contrasts because he's actually two professional fighters one with a slightly different spelling of his name and another one with the exact same spelling of his name who was a um i guess a famous karate guy in 70s movies um who uh according to the iron cheek was no jabroni

yeah he apparently fought well not the the martial art joe le Joe Lewis, fought Chuck Norris at one point. When I was attempting to find videos about the actual Joe Lewis that we're covering today, I found ones about the martial arts guy instead. One of the sources I used, celebfamily.com, in trying to find Joe Lewis, the billionaire's family. It is just a basic bio on the billionaire, but every photo is of the

african-american boxer and it's very funny to see like a photo of a shirtless black guy and then underneath it saying he was born in a jewish family in 1937 right right it is more appropriate that he's adopted golf as his favorite sport though because if you look at a picture of this guy it's his head is a fucking golf ball there's there's pretty few pictures of divots and everything yeah but yeah what you find is that it's not pretty no it's very bowling ball-esque the holes in his face being the holes you put your fingers in oh yeah i see it now it's it's his early life is a bit murky and he clearly there's clearly a lot of spin on it and

everything i found uh from the guardian to the international business times um they all give it kind of a have them uh rags to riches uh backstory uh he was born on february 5th 1937 in london's east end which is a um well-known working class neighborhood uh i guess there's a there's a sitcom east enders uh that i've never seen i'll just i'll just throw in interestingly he grew up uh pretty much where amy winehouse lived for a while oh yeah in bow london no no no more on that in a minute yeah so his in his story he he was the way he tells it he he was born above a pub and he kind of makes it sound like he just sort of popped out while his mother was stopping in there for a pint uh when the reality is that it was a pub that his dad owned um right he like he keeps coming back to how uh he dropped

out of school at the age of 15 uh to work at his father's catering company, Tavistock Banqueting. And he only made six pounds per week. And he'll tell it's kind of his newspaper route story about how he moved a bus stop sign from wherever it was to right outside his father's cafe to increase foot traffic. And that was a very successful thing. The thing is though, like clearly his father, aside from having the Tavistock banqueting company,

his father also owned this pub. And so it's not like his family was in poverty, the way he frames it. And also, you know, he worked for six pounds a week. That's surely wasn't a lot of money in the 50s but at the same time like he was working in his dad's pub so well it sounds like he basically i mean he's only 15 so he's not like of i don't think

that's the legal working age in uk so i think it's like an it's like an it's allowance basically yeah but like at least george soros had a real job at that age. He was handing out leaflets, telling people to report to the nearest train station. You know, his dad didn't own that company. The German government did. Yeah, I realize this guy Joe Lewis probably lived through the Blitz, but he was pretty young when it happened um from articles that i were was reading it said that uh when he was 15

he was selling like tourists american tourist tchotchkes as well as working at that bar so i mean really he lives above the bar he goes down to work in it because his dad owns it. The fact that he leaves school at 15 doesn't really make any sense. Yeah, he was just, I mean, I've got a friend who did this too, but unlike this guy, my friend didn't become a huge asshole. That's right. Thank you, Andy. I mean, it's a pretty common thing. When you've got the job lined up for you, it's a pretty common thing when you've got the the job lined up for you it's it's a pretty natural progression uh he he then took over the family business and i think

probably the selling um chachkis thing influenced him in a way because he he then went on to start a bunch of tourist oriented pub chains one of them called beefeater and then another one called cockney pride tavern and he also uh either bought or started uh this club hanover grand club in london's west end and then in 1979 he sold them all for 30 million dollars uh so yeah by the time he was in his what was that by the time he's in his 40s he um had a small fortune um but and also like a little piece of trivia that you see pop up everywhere is that he was the first boss for the guy who started planet hollywood in the hard rock cafe um and so you kind of get the impression that maybe that was also

kind of the types of establishments that he ran was like, you know, Cockney Pride. I don't think anyone who's actually Cockney would go to the Cockney Pride tavern chain. Yeah, it's like, okay, Sassenach. Could I just say one thing about the Cockney thing? So I read this profile on him in The Sun, which, for those not familiar, is kind of a rabidly anti-immigrant British tabloid paper. Oh, right up your alley. They can be quite vicious in The Sun. And you would think, like, this guy who's, like, a tax exile who's, you know, building his own military operation in Argentina, would get a vicious treatment. But no, they really did this kid gloves profile of him. And then I went to the user comments because they told the story of him, like we just said,

of him growing up upstairs in a pub and him being a cockney. And you remember you're reading The sun when you get to the user comments because one of them was uh if he grew up there now he would be his childhood would be interrupted by the call to prayer every morning and then but but then check out this other comment because it starts out good like i thought i was reading you, pushback on this fluff piece that I just read. The comment starts out, I'm quoting from it, Another terrible article. When did he acquire the Spurs?

We aren't told. How much did he pay? We aren't told. All we get is this press release. I'm assuming he's Jewish. If so, he isn't English. And if he isn't English, he isn't Cockney, no matter where he was born. No matter where he was born.

And that comment has two upvotes and four downvotes. Solid. But the son can't get away with selling this guy as Cockney to their discerning readership no he's like his dad owns at least three establishments right yeah that we know of uh it will too yeah it looks like he had a two that we were able to trace down i mean regardless when he sells those businesses, his dad must have, I mean, hopefully gotten a piece of it. And so out of that $30 million, either some of it went to his father or there was more that's undisclosed in $30 million is what went to Joe. Right. After expanding the business into other more themed restaurants and pubs throughout London, he's able to sell the business venture for £30 million, roughly, in 1979 pounds. By the way, in answer to that racist guy on The Sun's Question, he bought the Hotspurs in February of 2001 from Lord Sugar, a guy who gained notoriety in the last few years by tweeting out a picture.

I don't know if it's Photoshopped, but a picture of Jeremy Corbyn in a car with Adolf Hitler. Like Lord Sugar. That's because he had a sugar plantation right yeah i assume lord like when you're when you're at that level you're just named after the thing that you exploit people over did you know what i learned just uh reading the first few pages of the book the anarchy about the east india company the English word for loot actually comes from Hindi because that is the Hindi word for what the East India Company did to India. They looted all the treasure and natural resources,

so it actually came into the English language from the East India Company looting India. Wow. Thanks, guys. Neat. Apparently Lord Sugar also grew up in the east end and has a similar back backstory to this joe lewis guy so in 1979 he sells most of his debt what what he built from his dad's business venture for 30 million pounds and but slightly before that though in 1975 he founds the holding company tavistock group and that assumes much of the ownership

of what he would later sell um he ends up using the money from that venture to diversify his company shall we say and get into some interesting currency speculation i did want to just say i said i saw one article that said that when he was running those pub chains in the 60s, he hosted like Frank Sinatra and Tom Jones and other kind of popular acts of the time. Really? So, yeah. So, he had a pretty popular thing going that he inherited from his dad.

Oh, yeah. I mean, we should say he, I mean, it wasn't only sort of kitschy touristy stuff. There were also some nightclubs and whatnot. In some of those themed restaurants, I read somewhere that they had like sword swallowers and people in the full metal, the fuck is that thing called? The armor? Chain mail? Yeah, not chain mail. Suit of armor? Suit of armor, that's what it's called. Yeah, they had, I mean, like, you know, the motherfuckers started, you know, what's that American restaurant where they fucking joust? Well, it's supposed to be like Medieval Nights or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's that place called? Medieval Times? The Castle Place. Medieval Times. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, it's not like a great, like, food, but it's a good experience. So you have this guy profiting from people being like, we can go to this place where they got fucking sword swallers and then we can eat shitty pasta. That's essentially what Joe Louis sells for 30 million quid.

That made me think of another idea for a themed restaurant where you could have a vietnam war themed uh restaurant where in the corner you just have a gomer pile who loads a gun and then shoots a blank into his head every few minutes all the soap in the bathroom is in pillowcases so at the at the vietnam themed restaurant you can play russian roulette for a one in six chance your meal is free. Nobody in the restaurant is allowed to raise their arms for the waiter. They all have their arms broken. If you're at the Vietnamese restaurant, Jane Fonda will visit your table and whether or not you're liking it, she'll say you're having a great time and being treated very well.

When the server comes by and gives you your bill, he's like, this is your check. There are many like it, but this one is yours. The check comes with a snail on a razor blade but lastly on his time uh in the restaurant industry his first wife esther was once a waitress in his parents greasy spoon according to this is money.co.uk and he's got a theme with the women that he marries being uh proximity based women in his life his first wife who he divorced worked in his parents restaurant and his second wife would be his secretary and i don't know about you guys but fuck people who can't find pussy outside of their work relationships you know i mean right yeah well it's it's not just proximity it's like people he has power over his support your subordinates that's not it's just never okay right it is very funny though that yogi that you

phrased it as like proximity considering that you met your wife on twitter i mean she was very far away and i found her through a service that allowed me to wow her with 140 characters mind you it was pre 240 characters the game the game had no fat damn yogi your your wife and i must be reading different tweets on your feed because i'm not i'm not sure what it was so by the late 1970s mr lewis um joe lewis had a substantial fortune and from the sale of the restaurant assets. And they're basically all tied up in his investment vehicle called Hanover Grand PLC, which was a British holding company. He got some advice from some of his investor friends that he should become what's known as a tax exile and move to the Bahamas and then only come back to the UK up to a maximum time limit so that he doesn't switch back to being at UKCIS

and have to pay taxes at the higher rate for UK. Man, billionaires hate taxes. You guys ever notice this? There's never a billionaire who's like, you know what i love fucking taxes that's kind of important to like set the scene of his later currency trading because just you have to picture him on this like he's in he's in this tax haven sort of this enclave of like uh royal some like second rate sort of royalty from europe and rich english um bankers and traders

right and like they're they're sort of uh uh entourages so there's just like a little tip of bahamas that is just all that and so setting the scene he is in that community and he has a a pretty a pretty big house with like a what were you gonna say andy oh it's also uh interesting to keep in mind that he is in the bahamas in order to dodge taxes considering uh one of the stunts he pulled just recently with the Totenheim hot spurs to try to write off a bunch of his employees using COVID-19 emergency relief measures. Right. Well, it's, you know, and I did just want to say something on this. So yeah, like Steve just said there, he's been since 1979, he's officially been a resident of the Bahamas, though he spends apparently several months a year just on his yacht in the middle of the ocean.

So if anybody wants to take some direct action. But what I wanted to say with regards to that was just like the law in the UK has changed a bit, but officially the way it is now, if anyone who spends more than 183 days in the United Kingdom is considered a resident for tax purposes. So he'll come to the United Kingdom and he'll apparently park his yacht in London, and the government's totally fine with this. And that's really because when we talk about the prosperity of London, so much of it is based around this offshore finance system that he exploits, where, you know, we've talked about the looting of Russia and the Ukraine and other countries, particularly those two in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. and run through London banks. So much of this prosperity comes from this same system that he abuses and exploits. So, of course, the government doesn't give a shit

if he lives in the Bahamas on his yacht half the year. They're happy to welcome him in, even though he is a tax exile, and he is just doing this to avoid paying his fair share of taxes. Yeah, I mean, it's so obvious that, like, London City absolutely does not give a shit. In fact, i mean it's so obvious that like the like london city absolutely does not give a shit in fact they love that he's doing that because it means more fees and business for them to manage uh how they sort of containerize um someone's one's tax registry to avoid all of it

mostly but back to the bahamas so he has he has like a fairly large mansion there and uh reportedly like there's a new york times a long piece on him from 1998 um incidentally he almost never gives interviews but um this piece says that he essentially has like a large room with tons of screens sort of like the architect from the Matrix. But it's all foreign exchange stuff and market data. Right. And so I just pictured him in there chatting with Soros or something. In 1991 about this plot to short the British pound. The way that his wealth really exploded was so like the selling the

restaurants gets him into like the lower levels of the British elite and that's great but he the way his wealth really explodes is by getting into currency speculation and currency speculation is an area where it has like notoriously small margins and so you either have to use a whole lot of capital or you have to use a whole lot of leverage in his case in his case he used both and he was able to get in on what's called black wednesday well he's gonna be black thank you to well you see the thing is is, Yogi, about Wednesday is historically... Black Wednesday was an event when basically what happened is Britain was part of what was called the European exchange rate mechanism.

And this was a system prior to the euro that was trying to make it so the member states that would eventually join the euro later in uh in in the 90s and 2000s um there's their exchange rates between each other would have to stay within this narrow band that was uh it was um set up by the European Economic Community, it's like Initiative for Economic Integration, to be, it can never stray too far from the other countries in terms of this experimental proto-euro, basically. So they measured where countries were in terms of the synthetic currency

so that later on when they adjust to an actual euro it would be smoother right so Soros knew that Britain was in a pretty severe recession from 1989 uh to night like it ended up going all the way through 1993. And he knew that the Bank of England wouldn't be able to raise interest rates, even if they wanted to, if they faced some sort of, even in the face of some sort of currency pressure,

like if, say, someone were selling British pounds, like in a fire sale. So he knew that he could, if he had enough leverage and he had enough other people join in, he could get the British pound to devalue so much that it would fall outside of its narrowly prescribed exchange rate mechanism, like corridor of where the exchange rate could be, and then it would have to leave, which would devalue it even further. So what he did is he went around to every single bank

and investment firm that he could, and he borrowed up to... He and Soros actually teamed up with his quantum fund, and they collectively borrowed at one point up to 10 billion British pounds and then sold them and that created such a strain for the Bank of England because it needed to it needed to keep its exchange rate up in order to stay inside of the mechanism so that it was on track to, you know, meet its obligations with the Eurozone. But it couldn't.

From the Guardian, it said that it cost the Treasury an estimated 3.4 billion pounds. Yeah. So he's like, his gambit was basically, the exchange rate is high now, so I'm going to borrow and then sell these. And then it will cause so much pressure later that I'll be able to buy them back at a lower price and then repay my creditors and pocket the profit. So he's shorting the British pound. much pressure that um john major the conservative tory leader after thatcher like he was a huge fan of the exchange rate mechanism and he had kind of staked his political career on it but it eventually became a negative for him and it kind of influenced there's like a political side of this where he eventually had no choice but to take them off the exchange rate mechanism which triggered a huge evaluationaluation in the currency.

And that's where basically the source of Joe Lewis and George Soros' windfall came from. Right. I think that what's most frustrating is that Black Wednesday in 92 was obviously November 18th when the Chicago Bulls beat the Portland Trailblazers. I was also just going to say, we talked about this on our George Soros episode as well, but it is worth mentioning with Soros, by this time he was, you know, having meetings and lunches with finance ministers from all over the world on basically a daily basis. So, you know, I mean, they made a smart bet, but it was also partly they just had the connections with governments to know what was going on

and profit off of that. So this Joe Louis guy was clearly lucky or had the connections to know Soros, who in turn had other connections to various governments throughout Europe. Like the NY, there's another New York Times article I found that was covering like this drama. And it said, in 1992, Mr. Soros would gain fame

as the man who, quote, broke the Bank of England when he reportedly earned a billion betting against a pound. One over-animated French official, angered by speculation against the franc around the same time, called for currency traders to be beheaded and so i'm like we're like why would a civil servant break character and be that angry

about this so this must be more than just some abstract like monetary thing right well it's also tradition it's it's it's just kind of a reflexive response for the french this is kind of a sidebar but who do you guys think is more evil uh who who used their british pound money more evilly joe lewis who sets up this private military base in argentina and steals water resources from the locals or george soros who uses his money to stage several false flag school shootings in an attempt to steal guns from the American people. So I'm professionally obligated to defend Soros because he founded the DSA and those Soros checks really helped me when I first joined GSA. I don't know about you guys.

They keep the podcast afloat. There were some lean years in Grubstakers, so we never go too hard on George Soros. Yeah, I mean, those checks got me through some bad moments financially. So I guess I'll say provisionally Joe Lewis is worse. Yeah, I mean, in our weekly teleconferences with Soros, he says he gets a kick out of every time we talk about the false flag school shootings things,

because, you know, obviously I can't go into why, but it does cover for the real shit he's doing. We're paid for disinformation. Organizing Q. Are we allowed to say that George Soros is behind Q? Did he give us the green light on that? I think all of this is going to make Twitter call us all CIA psyops that much more,

especially Sean. Guys, I just checked our Patreon and it's empty. What happened? I don't need to see Sean to know he's hard. I think the average person, if they just heard about Black Wednesday and all that monetary nonsense, their eyes would kind of glaze over and be like, okay, what does this matter for workers and stuff? I would say that, well, one thing the Bank of England had to do because of this

fire sale that these guys initiated was since they were part of a fixed exchange rate regime, they had to use their other foreign exchange reserves to go out and buy enough British pounds in order

to stave off, to keep them within the range. So that means that they can't import valuable things like medicine or agricultural goods. It makes it harder for them to do that because they need to... It's just like several islands that have a lot of people but not that much arable land. And they have to import quite a lot.

So if the Bank of England has to go out and buy back British pounds in order to stave this thing off, they have a harder time importing those goods. goods and in fact this was like a major concern that the the chancellor at the time brought up with um the tory the tory government they're like listen you guys got to either leave this mechanism or find some cheaper means of acquiring the forex so that we can keep um buying the goods that we need so like there were it seems kind of arbitrary and like this stupid like okay this rich guy was screwing screwing over a government in this abstract way but actually they're like real consequences so okay i'm um uh stupid so as i understand it then he was the they were undermining the british um ability to import things because he was essentially offshoring a bunch of british currency in his process of short selling

um due to his so like he borrowed a vast number of british pounds and just sold them on the market and it caused the price the price of of the British pound and the other things to plummet. The Bank of England has their task with the job of staying within the band. In order to get the British pounds back and then offer

them at a better price for them, they need to go and buy those British pounds with other foreign currencies that they have. So like dollars, German marks, lira, all of these things. And as a central bank, one of your duties is basically to preserve those foreign exchange reserves for an emergency when, if you need to import something really badly.

So like, you know, like emergency goods, like, like food, medicine, that type of thing. Does that make sense? Right. Yeah. And, and so why was the French official so pissed off about it? I suspect it was mainly due to this reason, because it's like you're taking away

this country's ability to import things that it cannot make enough of within its own territory. So the French official was mad on behalf of... Oh no, there was another run on the Frank that was unrelated, but this was due to that.

I'm sure there were British civil servants who were just as pissed. But anyway, that's sort of the story with Black Wednesday. So Lewis, like, some say Lewis made just as much as Soros, which ended up being about a billion dollars. I was just going to say, slightly contrarian take. I don't think what they did was good, but it ended up keeping the United Kingdom off of the euro, which is one of the stupidest and most corrupt and downright evil economics projects that has been carried out in the 20th and 21st centuries. And you look at all the people condemned to poverty in Greece because

that country ended up on the euro it's it's probably for the best the united kingdom abandoned the erm yeah i mean some uh some in britain call it white wednesday you know because white is good and black is bad why does it got to be white steven just explained that the there it's literally called sometimes it's just called White Slash Black Wednesday because some people think it was bad because you left, you got off the track of eventually joining the Euro, and then other people think it's good because you got off the track of joining the Euro.

I like that the Brits have to wedge their racism even into currency manipulation. Yeah, so like some, I mean,ain was in a pretty bad recession still they're recovering and they couldn't raise interest rate well now that they're out of the exchange rate mechanism they're free to um lower interest rates and reduce strain on debtors you know and lay the groundwork for recovery at least on the monetary side so like they couldn't do that before so some people say actually this was good so this was this wasn't the only time that he engaged in large-scale currency use calculation um i think it was 1996 that he i want to say that he took a run at the mexican peso yeah so um just from whit Whitney Webb and Mint Press News, between 1995 and 1996,

he kind of repeated the play that he made with the British pound on the Mexican peso. And really, the effects for Mexico were far more devastating than it was for the United Kingdom, because the subsequent peso crisis in Mexico meant that they had to get an international monetary fund bailout, which was shepherded through by U.S. President Bill Clinton. And as a result, it led to, just quoting from Whitney Webb, a massive jump in poverty, unemployment, and inequality in Mexico, and of course, left the government at the mercy of the IMF. And you just look at all the things that have happened in Mexico since NAFTA. It's just been a long series of disasters and cartel murder and everything else.

And it took 20 years of that before they would finally elect a social Democrat, amlo the current president right i mean so like these like individual pecuniary actions of these currency speculators has can have just disastrous results for workers in a country right and also from the whitney webb piece she makes the argument that uh this run on the peso in 95 and 96 actually spread an economic recession throughout most of the Americas and severely impacted the economy of Argentina. And so in 96, as all this economic chaos hit Argentina, this is when Joe Louis goes in and starts buying up land. And, you know, we mentioned that earlier. We'll talk about it a little more in a second. But these things all have a ripple effect where you fuck up the economy in one place,

then suddenly it opens up good opportunities to buy at a steep discount somewhere else. So in, I think it was 1992, he met with another billionaire we've covered, Kerry Packer, in Argentina for for a trip to visit him there. And that was apparently, it inspired him to later in 1996 start buying up some real estate. Just on his own. Not with Tavistock, but on his own. Right. And so the land he's bought up in Argentina, I think, is the most scary and fascinating part of this guy, Joe Lewis.

And I really recommend these Whitney Webb articles in Mint Press News. She talks a lot about kind of the strange circumstances surrounding his land. But, you know, I said at the beginning that he's trying to create Shadow Moses in Argentina. And it seems like him and a couple other billionaires have bought up a bunch of land in Argentina, basically bought off the government. And they're trying to set up their own little community with, you know, its own water resources, its own oil, everything else, its own airport. And there's also rumors that Whitney Webb reports on of he set up his own airport in this community and IDF soldiers actually fly in there on a regular basis for training exercises. He has his own private security all over this thing. So it's like, and I guess something he even talked about with cary packer was his desire to set up his own nation so this is like a billionaire who lives on a yacht in the

middle of the ocean most of the year but he wants to have his own country within a country that potentially even uh secedes from a country or if not he just keeps it de facto where the argentine government is totally bought off so they'll just let him have a country within a country this yacht that sean's referring to mind you uh real quick it costs 250 million dollars it can have 16 people with eight cabins its name's aviva and it even has its own paddle tennis court on the yacht. And he takes it everywhere around the world from Argentina to Vietnam and then uses it in the Bahamas and goes to London. I mean, just think about that for a second, though. He takes a boat from the Bahamas to Vietnam and the UK. Like, what type of crazy billionaire is this?

In 2013, apparently he doesn't meet the players in Tottenham Hotspurs that much, but in 2013, he treated them to taking them on his yacht. And the best quote from one of these articles was one of the team members described him as, quote, a normal guy. Like a lot of these quotes energy yeah just like like you he just felt obligated to say about his boss no he's a normal guy right right a lot like so many of these profiles they'll have like kind of character assessments from other people whether say like different versions of the same thing where it's like yeah he's fine yeah it's like someone talking about their abusive partner like no he's tolerable and okay like it's like sounds like that person is fucking you over constantly yeah it's like maybe he was interviewed

on the yacht and there's like a really buff security guard standing there and he was right next to a railing um there there's actually a one quote about him i ran across was from a his his own daughter uh which was he doesn't like to talk to people it aggravates him yeah well and we should also just mention with the yacht i think we forgot to mention it earlier according to various reports this guy owns more than one billion u.s dollars worth of art like uh he owns a lot of picasso's a lot of other uh very rare and valuable paintings and apparently he keeps the majority of them on his fucking yacht that it's just floating around the ocean you know three or four months out of the year so just takes just takes one guy with a submarine and a homemade torpedo to put a billion

dollars worth of artwork on the floor of the atlantic ocean which good friends because how many more picasso's how many picasso's do you need you've got like three good ones and then a bunch of ones that are just fancy money laundering tools basically he's also got some miro you know um let's see there i mean there are other some other masters in there that we all care about a bunch of wall street bulls apparently yeah sean he doesn't have the wall street bulls on the yachts though right i don't think so so uh we were talking before we started recording the uh the wall street bull Bull was installed in 1989. Apparently, the artist didn't get permission from anybody in the government. He just set it up on Wall Street in 1989. If you're a Patreon subscriber, you might be familiar with Andy acquainting his tongue with the work. work but uh the uh but but so there are multiple copies of it of which joe lewis owns multiple copies i don't know how many copies he has but the original is still on wall street fucking hoarding dog he said they the the bowl was just put there by an artist they didn't give any like

permission right initially yes which slightly cooler now that I know that. Apparently they did the same thing with the fearless girl. Yes, but that was by a fucking bank. A criminal bank that was later to settle numerous sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits. I'm not sure if the guy behind the Wall Street bull was the most... I mean, it's a monument to Wall Street success success so i'm not i'm not sure if he was that pure of spirit as well look as long as as long as the bull kills the little girl that's all i care about we know but so and we could talk about also he has some links to you know stolen nazi art but uh i'll finish out the

argentina story first because this is very fascinating to me um it's the patagonia region of argentina near the near the border with chile um and it's specifically he originally bought the escondido lake and uh this is in 1996 he buys, this is a public lake, which the locals in the area, the town in El Bolson, they rely on this lake for water. And he bought all the property around this lake and enclosed the lake and cut off all public access to the lake in 1996. And it's not only that. Basically, according to Whitney Webb, in 1996, Lewis met this guy,

Nicholas von Dittmer, who apparently not only helped him purchase these lands in Argentina, he helped several other foreign oligarchs make land purchases in Argentina. Van Dittmer, I'm quoting from Whitney Webb here. hectares to lewis for about seven million u.s dollars however one of the montero brothers had refused and he along with his wife and their employee were all found dead under mysterious circumstances so we don't really know what happened but somebody refused to sell uh his his land to joe lewis and him his wife and his employee all turned up dead in 96, 97. I'm sure they're fine. I'm sure they're just hanging out, you know,

enjoying a different lakefront property that they now own. You know, and the Whitney Webb article, it's long, but it goes through all the different court battles because this land sale in the first place was illegal. Apparently it violated Argentine national security laws because it was right on the border with chile um a court ordered him to open up this public right-of-way like i said uh he buys all this land around the lake which the locals rely on and then shuts it off for public access and then uh the court in 2009 orders him to open it up to public access, and he just ignores it.

Apparently. What a fucking ass. Yeah. So apparently another court affirms the ruling. And then quoting from Whitney Webb in 2011, he publicly stated that his and his Hidden Lake employees, one of his employees in 2011, stated that they would defend Lewis's private property, quote, by fighting with blood if we have to. He also said he would keep locals from accessing the lake,

quote, with a Winchester rifle in hand, unquote. So these are like, he's just ignoring these court rulings that are telling him to open up a public right-of-way. And then he has his employees going out there saying, we're going to fucking kill the locals if they come anywhere near this. And he appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. And then this case is still ongoing. But it just should be noted, you know, according to Whitney Webb, he has so much contacts with the Argentine government. The former Argentine president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner,

she's the current vice president now, has flown on his helicopter, you know, so he has direct relationships with the current vice president and the former president of Argentina. So it was, what would happen is these local governments would rule against him. Apparently there was like a town vote against him. And then he just appeals directly to the federal government or the state government. He owns so much and can spend so much on just straight up bribery. Yeah. It seems like Joe Lewis of the UK seems to be like a argentinian joe exotic if you know what i mean it's so fucked up because so this private lake again um these people in this town uh rely on the water from it and courts have said that they have the right to go to this lake uh

joe lewis and his employees say no they have to take this much more dangerous path that apparently goes over the hills and actually has risk of death and bodily harm instead of the much more simple public access right-of-way. But so Whitney Webb covers in 2019, there were what were called the March for Sovereignty protests, where a bunch of marchers from the town came together to march to the lake which is again has court affirmed public access they were blocked by um they were blocked by joe lewis's employees and threatened you know his private security goons and then quoting from the article two participants in the march they mounted inflatable kayaks with the intention of placing an argentine flag in a small island in the middle of the lake, itself technically a public space. Before they made it to the island, two speedboats belonging to Joe Lewis's company circled the kayaks in an effort to capsize them while taunting them,

asking, do you know what it's like to die from hypothermia, unquote. Joe Lewis's employees capsized both of these boats and left them freezing in the water. After several minutes, several witnesses stated that one of the security guards told the kayakers, well, now do you see what it's like to die of hypothermia, unquote? They were lifted into guard boats. Both had to be hospitalized because they'd spent so much time in the freezing water. So, I mean, this is the kind of thing he's doing. He owns the fucking government.

It doesn't matter if you can get a court ruling saying this is public land. He's just going to appeal above your head, and he has private security goons to enforce his property rights. cancer charity that he started after his own father charles passed away from cancer but yeah it seems like he wants to own argentina without them knowing it right and it is just like i should clarify so this lake the reason he wants this lake is to set up his private state he's got he's in progress to build this this uh area that's supposed to be four times the size of the city of Buenos Aires, and he wants the lake as a water source for this area. So, you know, this town, El Bolson, that we mentioned, you know, the town residents rely on this lake, and just quoting from Whitney Webb, protests against him have attracted as many as 15,000 participants from the town of El Bolson, which is nearly 80% of the town's entire population. So this guy has 80% of this

fucking town protesting him because they recognize he's stealing their water. He's gonna encircle their lake, drain all their water, and use it to set up his private little state within a state where apparently IDF soldiers fly into the airport and engage in training exercises so it's all very weird what's going on here for those wondering buenos aires is 78.5 square miles so this area that he wants to own is 314 miles worth of land square miles wow which like you know saying four times as much as i just didn't know what how big buenos aires was but like you know 300 miles of land that includes a lake is fucking you know how many people's lives and air quality and water access is he ruining because he wants to build his own state right and you know the article goes through all the legal wranglings I mentioned earlier.

The town voted it, the town that he wants to, that he set up his private airport in, they voted in 2009, 79% of voters voted against this private airport. But he basically appealed to the federal government and did a little loophole thing where he got some other person who had tertiary property rights to set up their own private community in the area, which just happened to include an airport and then sell it to him. So, I mean, he's just been ignoring court order after court order and appealing to higher and higher authorities. And he's clearly so close to the Argentine federal and state governments

that really nobody bothers to enforce the law against him fucking crazy right well someone someone did in 1999 yeah supposedly there was a assassination attempt taken on joe lewis and his wife i don't know if assassination is the right term but as they disembarked from a helicopter the helicopter would explode immediately incinerating the pilot which this article mentioned that was a family friend. But they weren't able to find out who caused the explosion. Another article I found said that it was a mechanical failure. But I don't know.

I mean, could someone in South America want to have taken out Joe Lewis via helicopter? I think so. It's also, I found a fascinating connection here. We mentioned that Joe Lewis is friends with Tiger Woods. We also noted in the Chris Klein episode that he married Tiger Woods' ex-wife, or not married, but he fucked Tiger Woods ex-wife and Chris Klein of course went on to die in a helicopter crash and another interesting tidbit that I found seeming to detect a pattern is that Tiger Woods was friends with Kobe Bryant. Oh.

So. Actually this guy does mentor Shaquille O'Neal, and there were comments that Kobe Bryant said we would have had more rings if Shaq got off the bench and practiced his jump shot. And then Kobe Bryant died in the helicopter crash like a few days later. So business mentor Joe Lewis may have a hand in helicopter-related. If you know what I mean, I think it's tiger. I think tiger woods. When he's not golfing, he's going through helicopter manuals, looking for weak spots, little things that you can unplug.

I mean, I, I can't say for certain that this is the case, but I will say that if you've pissed off Tiger Woods, don't get in a helicopter. That must be like torture if you're Tiger Woods and you're known as like a golf legend, but you can't reveal to the world your true passion

as an expert's helicopter saboteur. Like, I'm the Tiger Woods of blowing up billionaire helicopters and nobody will know that or appreciate it when he's reading the article in the newspaper that the helicopter explodes he just suddenly does a tiger woods fist pump that's what that's what his his wife ran out that night right right right she's realized the truth about his obsession with killing people in helicopters yeah he's not a sex addict he's just addicted to to sabotaging why do you think why did you think i have any of this why do you think i started golf yeah he's not he's not fucking women he's just traveling the world learning about different types of helicopters and their weaknesses uh and you know i want to talk about this assassination attempt for a second because

i mean it makes a lot of sense here when when you read up on this guy and again it's a real disservice to uh the british readership of the tabloids that they're not informed of any of this shit you know like one of the fucking owners of their football clubs is a Metal Gear Solid boss battle, basically. But like this fucking guy, so this town is called Laderas, L-A-D-E-R-A-S. And we mentioned the town of El Bolson, where 80% of it is protesting him

because he's stealing their water supply to set up a new state, four times the size of Buenos Aires and also to their north. So the entire idea is he's got, you know, this private airport, he's got a thousand luxury homes, he's got a golf course, shopping centers, an artificial lake, and the entire idea is he's going to not only steal their water but steal their tourism. So everyone who comes to El Bolson will instead go to his little private resort that he's setting up. But I just wanted to quote one other thing from this Whitney Webb article about the private airport at his new town that he's building. It's capable of, I believe, accepting two commercial airplanes at a time. So, you know, two 747s or whatever have you can land there and

be fueled and disembark passengers there at a time. But quoting from the Whitney Webb article, most notably, however, there has never been any presence of Argentine customs or any other form of Argentine government control over what or who flies into or out of that airport, even though the airport is capable of receiving international flights. The point is particularly concerning in light of allegations that Lewis receives thousands of IDF soldiers annually for training on his property. And so, you know, this is just kind of something where it's like, this guy probably did have an assassination attempt against him in 99 because he's got a fucking airport that no argentine customs officials are looking at you don't know if he's running guns or mercenaries or drugs out of it you have no idea what he's doing with his international airport

you know who i think was behind the helicopter actually i've changed it from tiger woods it was the uh simbionese liberation this was uh joe was Joe Lewis after exiting the helicopter. He's just trying, he just wants to build a shagahood. Yeah, right, right. But we'll see what happens with the Argentina property. You know, again, these protests against it are ongoing. Whitney Webb is a great reporter who's looked at this stuff, so please check out her work if you're interested. But I did want to quote one last thing. According to the research

of former French intelligence officer turned journalist Therese Masson, Lewis has been inviting thousands of IDF, Israeli Defense Force, soldiers to his territory annually. In late 2017, he alleged, since the Falklands War, the Israeli army has been organizing, quote, holiday camps in Patagonia for its soldiers. Between 8,000 and 10,000 of them now come every year to spend two weeks on Joe Louis's land. This guy is setting up fucking shadow Moses within Argentina. And we'll see if the protests do anything and we'll see if public scrutiny perhaps motivates the government to do something about this guy setting up a state within a state. But we should mention with the time we have left, I guess he lost big on Bear Stearns. Well, yeah. So obviously he's not very well known about everything that he's doing in Argentina. But one thing he is pretty well known for, at least was well known for in 2008, was listening very – one of his currency trading screens was apparently playing this clip of Jim Cramer. OK. Peter writes, should I be worried about Bear Stearns in terms of liquidity and get my money out of there? No, no, no. Bear Stearns in terms of liquidity and get my money out of there? No, no, no. Bear Stearns is fine.

Do not take your money. If there's one takeaway other than a plus 400, Bear Stearns is not in trouble. I mean, if anything, they're more likely to be taken over. I didn't realize we were still airing that. Kramer's been dead for six months. months so joe lewis had probably one of the biggest curb your enthusiasm um adventures with bear stearns he uh he managed to lose one billion dollars in one day uh when they got sold over to jp morgan and how he it wasn't just like something where he passively had his money sitting in Bear Stearns and then they went under. He had going into the crisis about a 7 percent stake in Bear

Stearns that he had acquired over the years. And then as the mortgage crisis started to roll into gear, two of the hedge funds in bear stearns imploded and the share price dropped from a high of about 150 to 110 and uh we've kind of teased at it that joe lewis has uh kind of a gambler's mindset and so i think he he had the um uh had the impulse to buy the dip, and he just started buying as many shares as he could. He increased his stake to 10% by hundreds of thousands of Bear Stearns shares, owning up to 11 million shares. And then it collapsed completely to the point where they had to make a deal with J.P. Morgan to sell off their shares at about $2 per share, which was after the federal government stepped in in order to make it look like less of just kind of a scam and a payout to J.P. Morgan, who was also being bailed out. But he still had $2 billion when he – he had $3 billion initially. He still had $2 billion to fall back on after he blew that 1 billion.

And so it's not like he suffered a major loss. He since recouped it. And as we mentioned, has like 4.6 billion now. But yeah, just like it went, when he goes golfing, he,

he has, he apparently will tell people that like they can only golf with him if they'll bet $30,000. Right. He won't play unless they do $30,000 per hole. Yeah. Yeah. He was per hole. Yeah.

He's just an obsessive compulsive gambler. He's also one of the horse billionaires. It's just worth noting. He bought some thoroughbreds. And not like the kind of horse billionaire that McKenzie Bezos is, but the kind where he bought horses for the Tony Soprano reason where he just wanted to race them. So I did want to mention with this guy, Joe Lewis, there's no direct Jeffrey Epstein connection.

But this Bear Stearns stuff is always weird to me because something we just talked about on our Hearst episode is, um, according to wallstreetonparade.com, uh, Jeffrey Epstein was the chairman of this fucking Bermuda company, Bermuda based company called, um, uh, liquid funding, LTD.

Bear Stearns was as of 2002, the 40% owner of liquid funding, LTD and liquid Funding LTD. Liquid Funding LTD was this offshore vehicle, apparently had $6.7 billion in outstanding liabilities as of 2006. Again, Bear Stearns owns 40% of this thing. Jeffrey Epstein is the chairman for some reason. Jeffrey Epstein, of course, worked for Bear Stearns for a while.

And again, the allegation made by Wall Street on Parade is it's very possible this Jeffrey Epstein company got a big chunk of the Federal Reserve bailout that starts in 2016 goes up until they're bought by JPMorgan Chase. So it is just weird. Anybody who has links to Bear Stearns is like you know less than three degrees of separation from Jeffrey Epstein Bear Stearns is fine do not take your money just to give for some further context so like their stock was trading at 172 dollars a share as late as January 2007 and then like I mean like Andy said it eventually sold for 10 dollars a share. It was low as $2, but they worked at a fair price at $10, I guess. Andy, you're being very unfair to Jim Cramer by playing that clip because you're not showing moments before when he was on the phone saying, come on, Jeffrey, Bear Stearns is a dog. No, no, no.

And Jeffrey said, come on, come on, Jim, I've got you on tape. You got to sell the people bear stirs been dead for six months i like that i like that um in january or like in yeah in january 2007 bear sterns was had a level of debt to equity otherwise known as leverage of about 35 to 1 meaning that if it's if its position moved even one percent in against it for long enough it would just it would technically be like almost bankrupt at certain points yeah i have no idea what he was thinking when he was just pouring money into there. It's clearly not something a rational, smart person would do. No.

It's a guy that has a lot of money and goes, fuck it. I'm going to bet. It might work, it might not. But I'll make most of it back probably. That's the way he looks at it, I feel. He was probably betting on a bailout yeah but bear stearns never finessed for bailout they uh like he didn't i don't think he owned too much he didn't own any bear stearns debt i don't think so like if he had if he bought up a bunch

of corporate debt i could see like the you know the the bailout play i guess yeah, judging by what happened to all the other banks, if Bear Stearns wanted a bailout, they could have gotten a bailout. But I think, Stephen, you were telling me before we recorded, there was a gentleman by the name of Dick Fold, who was the CEO. Oh, well, he was Lehman. Oh, he was Lehman. Oh, okay. And he wanted to save it through the private market. Maybe that was Lehman. Oh, he was Lehman. Oh, okay. And he wanted to save it

through the private market. Maybe that was the mindset going on at Bear Stearns. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, they certainly, there's some good drama docs about Bear Stearns. I forget the name of one of them.

But like they have, they had like all sorts of meetings with private actors and the Treasury Secretary Paulson wanted them to, quote, get, like, this should be a private like, he didn't want to get the government involved with the bailout or something like that. He wanted to avoid Lehman, the Lehmanman scenario but yeah so closing out uh let's talk about why north london fucking hates this guy um we've we've

already talked about it a bit um that he owns the premier league football team the tottenham hot spurs um which uh he officially owns them through uh one of his uh investment companies called enoch group and that's just an acronym for english national investment company and day by day it's run by another billionaire by the name of daniel levy uh who's a friend of Lewis. And they repeatedly just do wildly unpopular things. Like, as we mentioned last year, the team, just out of pure, just out of being cheap, they didn't buy a single new player to bolster their squad. So they had that Argentine, ironically, coach named Mauricio Pacino.

And he was basically left out to dry because the board wasn't buying any new uh players and so when they had a disappointing performance uh they just sacked him instead and uh as we mentioned earlier he uses an advanced form of sabermetric salary cutting where he plays pays his argentine players with access to water they put them on this uh they they the brits have this adorable term for it they put him on this uh they they the brits have this adorable term for it they put him on gardening leave where of course they're paying him um to not be coach until he finds a better job and uh then when the covid crisis came around uh they announced their plan to furlough 40 of their non-playing staff,

which is approximately 550 people, and imposed the salary cut of 20%. And there was such massive backlash by the fans. Apparently the year before when they didn't buy any new players, they got the hashtag Enoch out trending, which was like pretty good class consciousness on the part of the fan base um but they so they got they planned to furlough 40 of their 550 person staff uh cut the salary by 20 uh and the fans had so much backlash that they uh embarrassingly had to walk it back uh claiming that they would only cut the payout of the board for the team and then they asked uh pochettino to take a pay cut and clearly once they did that he immediately took it to the press um and finally to add insult to injury as we hinted at

uh they dipped into this government scheme where employers in the uk because of covet 19 measures they can claim 80 of their furloughed staff's monthly wages uh in their taxes and so this tax cheat joe lewis who you know lives on his boat so that he doesn't have to pay taxes is now asking the british government for money uh to pay for his staff that he didn't want to pay for anyway wow yeah i mean i'm just surprised that uh dan levy's dad eugene levy of sctv is involved with all of this it is just like i mean it tells you who really owns the british press i mean obviously the people who own capital because you would think this like violently nationalist paper like the sun or the daily mail or whatever would care that this offshore tax cheat is, you know, just completely fucking over the public purse, dodging taxes, but also stealing benefits that are clearly

meant for domestic British employers. But everybody, every rich person in London is all playing the same offshore game. They're not going to call each other on it. I did just want to mention the art stuff because we said he has all these paintings on his boat and uh something that we've talked about a lot is that art is very liquid if you know you're a fucking international criminal you can unload a picasso for for 20 million so he has this floating uh art exhibit on his boat that gives him access to money and i did just want to mention really quick we know

because of the panama papers we know because of the panama papers uh and mosaic von seca the uh the um the panama company that was helping all these people set up offshore companies we know that he did like this weird thing with this christie's art auction uh where he set up a bunch of shells he bought up some paintings including the picasso some picasso's uh he went in with christie's and had this major art auction in 1997 called the Gans Collection in 1997. In the Guardian piece, they described this as a steroid injection to the art market, where, you know, it kind of set off this crazy inflation in art prices that we've seen. But what I just wanted to mention here is that he is a major owner in Christie's.

Apparently, between 94 and 98, he was the largest shareholder, the single largest shareholder in Christie's, the art trading house. And what I just wanted to mention about that is in 1996, Christie's sold a painting called Seated Man with a Cane, which is a 1918 painting by the Italian artist Omedo Modigliani. And it's relevant because this painting was stolen out of Paris by the Nazis in 1940 when they occupied Paris. And its original owner, who owned it in 1940, was a Jewish man who had to flee Paris, of course,

because the Nazis came. The Nazis took it, and his descendants have been in court ever since trying to get it back. And Christie's had no problem in 1996 selling this thing and pocketing the money. And then Mossack Fonseca also helped the current, quote-un quote unquote owners of the piece fight legal

battles against the family members descendants trying to get it back but I guess I just wanted to mention that this guy in addition to everything else made some money off of Nazi art and has a little floating art warehouse that he uses to to keep himself

liquid if shit goes south with his argentine state property how does he insure any of that if it's just on a ship any of the art i mean i mean he's not paying taxes he so he just he doesn't give a fuck i think well like and that's the thing they tried to sell that painting in 2008 but all the bidders were like yeah this is stolen nazi art so we're not gonna buy it so it's just in some warehouse in geneva waiting for the legal battle to be sorted out i don't know if all the bidders were like i don't like this nazi art i'm sure some of them were like i mean i'll consider some nazi art in my collection yeah some of them just kind of other people were saying it so they joined in

yeah some of them were probably like, well, let's wait until there's a less public auction. Maybe something a little more under the table. Right. Right. Yeah. The other,

the other investors who complained about it all leave. And then a few of them are still there and they're like, listen, I'm surprised there's not a private Nazi art auction. That they've set up. it's it's it's strange that they're doing this in public when clearly they've got all the back channels they need if they really want to unload some nazi art but maybe they're just especially cocky well i believe that joe lewis tried to own a majority stake in Christie's but was unsuccessful at one point. So I don't know exactly how much of the art market itself is just for corruption and hoarding money,

but if you own even a significant portion of Christie's, you must be doing a lot of that. Right. Well, according to The Guardian, he bought like 30% and then he sold his stake in 1998 for a tidy profit after helping drive up this money laundering art market uh price inflation if you if you own if you own the auction house i mean whatever whatever price they strike at auction christie's gets a percentage of that right so he benefits from generally inflating art prices for like like you know specific time periods from europe or whatever yeah the house always wins i do just like that there's a warehouse in switzerland where you can find all the hottest nazi stolen goods

just the shit's too hot defense so it's just got to stay in switzerland for a while there was a heist movie about that a while ago. I guess it was based on a true story. Some people did a heist raiding a bunch of personal security boxes in Switzerland, and a bunch of the stuff that they made off with was not claimed later. Oh, really? Yeah, because it was Nazi loot. Switzerland gets a reputation for neutrality, but I'm going to go out on a limb and saying that keeping stolen Nazi goods is not a neutral position.

You're actually taking a side when you do that. Wait a minute. This is stolen Nazi art. All right, we're wrapping this puppy up. And with that, this has been Grubstick So loud, so loud, so loud, so loud. All right, we're wrapping this puppy up. And with that, this has been Grubstickers. I'm Yogi Poyol. I'm Andy Palmer.

I'm Steve Jeffers. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Stay safe. Bye. Joe Lewis was perhaps the least skilled boxer to ever rule the heavyweight division. He reigned as a champion for an astounding 12 years with 52 wins by KO.

Many of them came by way of his flawless cross. Lewis's style of fighting was minimalistic, and he was incredibly patient. He would make incremental adjustments of mere inches to get his preferred distance, and wait until the most opportune time. If Lewis wasn't sure he could land a knockout with his cross at that exact moment, he simply didn't throw it. It's ironic that one of the most technically sound and mechanically proficient boxers in history used techniques that would today be considered overly risky or even sloppy. But Lewis used these powerbuilding methods with purpose and forethought.

As so many modern day boxers have forgotten, without risk, there's no glory.