Hezbollah, a jihadist empire stretching out from Lebanon that has harried the US and Israel for decades, is being financed by a quiet Tamil Brahmin from Madurai named Nagarajan Sundar Poongulam Kasiviswanathan, who serves as its accountant.
The Lady Automaton, her head replaced by a retro telephone, cradled a cardboard box: Evidence, it read. Luke Agada, the artist who created the work, either had a strange premonition—or an insider’s sense of humour. From studios in Chicago and New York, the work of emerging masters like Lucy Bull and Flora Yukhnovich, as well as the canonical art of Mark Rothko and Jean-Michel Basquiat, had been flowing to the Artual Gallery, in downtown Beirut. Eyebrows had begun to be raised.
From his penthouse in Beirut, the suave art collector Nazem Ahmad—whose acquisitions are believed to have included Pablo Picassos and Andy Warhols—funnelled the art to collectors across Europe. He also traded top-grade diamonds sourced from blood-soaked battlegrou...
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