Saturday, June 15, 2013

New England Patriots Owner: Putin Stole My Super Bowl Ring

There is really something poetic about a bunch of crony capitalists in Russia, with one of them getting ripped off in pure daylight by a master state operator.

NyPo reports:
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft revealed the real story behind a 2005 meeting with Vladimir Putin, during which the Russian president pocketed his Super Bowl ring, worth more than $25,000. Kraft, at the time, claimed the diamond-encrusted bauble was a gift, but he now admits Putin stole it, and the White House intervened when he demanded it back. 
Kraft explained the incident happened while Sandy Weill and other business execs were in St. Petersburg. “I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’ ” Kraft told the crowd at Carnegie Hall’s Medal of Excellence gala at the Waldorf-Astoria.“I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”

Of course, the White House intervened on the side of its Russian power-center counterpart, Putin:
 Kraft released a statement at the time, “President Putin, a great and knowledgable sports fan, was clearly taken with its uniqueness. I decided to give him the ring as a symbol of the respect and admiration that I have for the Russian people and [his] leadership.

But Kraft really wanted the 4.94-carat bauble back, he said Thursday, admitting he’d gotten a call from the George W. Bush-run White House, saying, “‘It would really be in the best interest of US-Soviet relations if you meant to give the ring as a present.” (In fact the Soviet Union had collapsed 14 years earlier.)

But, Kraft said, “I really didn’t [want to]. I had an emotional tie to the ring, it has my name on it. I don’t want to see it on eBay. There was a pause on the other end of the line, and the voice repeated, ‘It would really be in the best interest if you meant to give the ring as a present.’ ”

4 comments:

  1. This unverified story is several years old; Kraft has been telling it for a while...Kraft signs Teebow, and the story comes out again...the elite never sleep.

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  2. Very bad thing if true. But is it?

    It's kind of odd that it comes out just as the US announces escalation in Syria and just before a Monday G8 meeting where Obama will meet Putin on the sidelines.

    Lysander

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  3. Putin is such a bad ass.

    And additionally, Mr. Kraft needs to wake the hell up and realise that we're not living in the 1980s. There is no Soviet Union, there is no KGB. Typical of the rich white elites of the US to be so lost in the modern world.

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  4. "Putin Stole My Super Bowl Ring."

    So did the Bears, Packers, and Giants... On the other hand what did he expect from a thug like Putin?

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