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An ode to the machines that animate the economics of society.

inquiries: mudasser@gmail.com or direct purchase in the FFFFANBOY Company Barracks.

DJ DNTFCKRND – 100° by DJ DNTFCKRND

1. Where are y’all from and who are you?

Co-$ign: Jackson Mississippi, Sir Flywalker: Memphis Tennessee. We are a hip hop duo and we go by the nomenclature “Da A$tronautZ”. We are stationed in Jackson MS.

2. Describe your music, your style.

C + S: Our Music is a plethora of life situations, from a different point of view. Realistic messages, positivity, and pushing creativity with no limitations. Our style is very unorthodox, while at the same time, relevant and stylish and we think that is what draws in our listeners.

3. Fill me in on your movement, the progression… how it started where it is now.

C + S: Our movement is a collective and elite music group named “Ninja Foot Clan”. We have progressed much, with the promotion of “Da A$tronautZ” and Flywalker BeatZ, getting placement with a variety of artists including Curren$y and Trademark. It started with an inside joke, us calling ourselves ninjas based on how we stay silent, but strike with force, like musical samurai’s. It is climbing, slowly but surely… We are getting a lot of respect from major outlets and supporters of the music we produce.

4. Top 5 brands right now?

C + S: Polo, Mighty Healthy, Diamond Supply co, BBC, and Ice Cream.

5. Fitteds or Snapbacks?

C + S: Snapbacks (Vintage) …although Bucket hats are doper than both.

6. Your career/musical influences?

C + S: A Tribe Called Quest, OutKast, Thelonius Monk, Jay Z, Tupac, NoID, Ski Beatz, Kanye West, Jadakiss, Camron, Curren$y, Sadé, Common, and Talib Kweli.

7. What are your one year goals? Where do you want to be next year when we do this interview again?

C + S: In one year we would’ve hoped to have reached more fans, after our major project “NASA” along with the “GTA” series that starts on 9/11, and start touring or doing more shows. Next year, when we do this interview again, I would hope that we are established as a brand, with a 10,000+ fanbase following. On a circuit making music with some of the top artists of today.

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A Prelude to the much anticipated TGTE LA, FANBOY gets into summer gear in Brooklyn, NY, East Orange, NJ and in Hamilton, ON. FFFFAST TIMES. An “Art Walk” before the Art Walk in downtown Los Angeles this thursday at The Local Tourist Spot.

A fast night in Huddersfield turns into a blurry night on the motorway. When the need is green, West Yorkshire knows one source: Sheffield Blues.

Every night serves as inspiration for the next. In Hamilton, we tend to loiter in downtown where the moods change like the colour of the sky.

The 80s was a wild time for hash in Montreal. In 1986, the RCMP confiscated a 14-ton truckload of hashish on Cape Breton Island, and another 16 tons from a ship at the Halifax port. The captain of the ship told police that he had to pay off senior militia officers with the Christian Phalangists in Lebanon to get the shipment out of the country. Like the West End Gang, the Montreal mafia had direct ties with hashish exporters in Lebanon that date back to the 1970s. According to a 1989 Montreal Gazzette article, members of the Montreal mafia established a mutually beneficial trading partnership with Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias, which bartered hash for weapons and cash.

In 1980, the FBI confirmed that a large shipment of weapons including m16s and ammunition had been stolen from a Boston armoury, smuggled to Montreal, and then sent to Lebanon in exchange for hashish. Police also established a link between Frank Cotroni and senior figures in Lebanon’s government and military. Wiretaps on Frank Cotroni’s phone in the mid-1970s revealed that he was making calls directly to the home of Suleiman Franjieh, who at the time was president of Lebanon. Cotroni also allegedly made several trips during the 1970s to Lebanon to organize hash shipments with senior Lebanese officials.

In early December 1987, a two-month investigation by the RCMP resulted in the seizure of 13 metric tons of Lebanese hash off the Newfoundland coast and the arrest of size Montreal men. The investigation began in October when RCMP officers seized 500 kilos of hash from a trawler at the port of Blanc Sablon, Quebec, on the north coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, near Labrador. The seizure led the RCMP to suspect that large hash shipments were being loaded aboard small craft in the area from mother ships anchored in international waters off the coast of Newfoundland. Following tips from fishermen about unusual ship traffic around Trinity Bay, the RCMP made a series of other seizures from boats and trucks in Newfoundland in late November. Among those charged in connection with the seizures were Vito Rizzuto and thirty-four-year old Raynald Desjardins, the man police alleged to be in charge of the importations. Desjardins was not merely a drug importer; he has been described as “the most influential non-italian in the Montreal mafia since William Obront and Armand Courville.” He was the brother-in-law of long-time mob member Joe Di Maulo and, in 1973, he and Di Maulo accompanied Paolo Violi to New York City to participate in the election of Phil Rastelli as the new boss of the Bonanno Family.

On November 18, 1988, while out on $150,000 bail from his 1987 arrest, Rizzuto was again arrested for conspiring to smuggle 32 metric tons of Lebanese hash into the country, which police believe was scheduled to land in Sept-Iles, Quebec. Police charged him solely on the word of Normand Dupuis, the owner and captain of the boat where the drugs were found. Rizzuto was acquitted of all charges in December 1989, after Dupuis was caught on tape making an offer to Jean Salois, Rizzuto’s laywer. He was trying to persuade Salois to provide him with a “lifetime pension” if he would agree to disappear before Rizzuto’s trial. Salois had already been contacted by Dupuis and had a tape recorder running when the offer was made in person in his office. Salois took the tapes to police, who in turn handed them over to prosecutors. Their star witness no longer had any credibility and the decision was made to drop the charges against Rizzuto. It was Dupuis who would go to jain on a thirty-two-month sentence for obstructing justice (on top of his sentence for the drug charges).

Adnan Khashoggi is almost a cartoon of the Saudi wheelerdealer: a sometime venture capitalist and arms middleman, ridiculously rich and unapologetic. One day Khashoggi turns up in the newspapers accused of obtaining $64 million in illegal loans from the collapsed Bangkok Bank of commerce. The next day he’s in the New York society columns, attending charity balls in the Hamptons and donating millions to help American farmers.

The son of personal physician of Ibn Sa’ud, who founded the modern Saudi Kingdom in 1932, Khashoggi was serving by the mid-1970s as middleman on an estimated 80 percent of all arms deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia. From Lockheed alone, he pocketed $106 million in commissions from 1970 to 1975. Northrop officials told a Senate subcommittee looking into foreign payments by U.S. corporations that it had given Khashoggi $450,000 to bribe Saudi Generals into buying the company’s wares – an allegation that didn’t prevent the Reagan administration from using Khashoggi as its own middleman during the Iran-Contra fiasco. (Having served as basically a pimp for the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, Khashoggi knew how to cut a dirty deal as well as anyone.)

In the late 1970s Khashoggi made a splash by trying to donate nearly $600,000 to three prestigious Philadelphia-area colleges (Swarthmore, Haverford and Bryn Mawr) to establish a Middle East studies program that would create understanding and sympathy for the Arab point of view. That plan fell apart the Northrop bribe charges surfaced. Undeterred, the civic-minded Khashoggi jumped back into higher education in 1984 with a $5 million gift to American University, on Massachusetts Avenue in D.C., halfway between the White House and the Beltway. AU had planned to honor Khashoggi’s money by naming the school’s new sports center and convocation hall after him, but administrators changed their minds in the wake of the Iran-Contra hearings. Even universities have consciences, apparently.

By January 1987, when Time put Khashoggi on its cover as the prototype of the new international operator, he was a regular at Marbella, the jet-set-hot retreat on the Spanish Riviera, where he maintained a five-thousand-acre estate. Other addresses included Paris, Cannes, Madrid, the Canary Islands, Rome, Beirut, Riyadh, Jeddah, Monte Carlo, a 180,000-acre ranch in Kenya, and a $30 million thirty-thousand-square-foot apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York with a pool overlooking the spires of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. To get to and among his many homes, Khashoggi had his choice of the 282-foot yacht Nabila, the same one used in the James Bond movie Never Say Never Again; a DC-8, where he could rest on a ten-foot-wide bed beneath a $200,000 spread of Russian sable; two other commercial-size jets; twelve Mercedes stretch limos; and so on. (Time estimated the cost of Khashoggi’s lifestyle at $250,000 a day in early 1987, servants included, or a little over $91 million a year, roughly a quarter of the annual budget of Haiti) At Marbella, there was a small warehouse devoted to nothing but the Saudi’s wardrobe: over a thousand handmade suits alone, cleaned, pressed, encased in plastic, and ready to be shipped to any golden shore where their owner might happen to wash up for a few nights or more.

In late 1968, days after Richard Nixon won the White House, Khashoggi was one of the first to fly out to congratulate the president-elect. He didn’t forget to pass on the regards of Interior Minister Fahd, the prince who’d sent him to San Clemente and the current brain-dead king. When Khashoggi got up to leave, he “forgot” his briefcase, which happened to be stuffed with $11 million in hundreds. No one said a word. Khashoggi went back to his hotel to wait for a telephone call. The phone never rang. It never would. A couple days later, and Khashoggi knew the trick had worked: Washington was for sale.