ATHENS – More than 800 people turned out at the Onassis Foundation here to see a second re-creation of the most famous case in history, the rigged verdict of the Trial of Socrates in which the famed philosopher was put to death in 399 B.C. for the crimes of impiety and corrupting Greek youth, which goes on all the time these days but mostly by Greek politicians and the country’s rich, who sprinkle it with a little corruption and embezzlement here and there.
Socrates was acquitted in a first re-trial last year at the Onassis Foundation in New York, and while it was 2,411 years too late to help him, was found not guilty again in Athens, not too far from where he was imprisoned and drank hemlock, a drink only slightly worse than the dirt-ridden frappe which is the national coffee drink now. The judges were deadlocked, 5-5, but just like a tie in baseball goes to the runner, it goes to the defendant in a capital case too. It was enough to make Socrates turn over in his grave and again shout, “Nothing is to be preferred before justice!” or at least, “Damn, I should have ordered an ouzo.”
It helped him, in the day of the Internet and hindsight, that the audience and viewers on live streaming voted in favor of him too, by the lopsided margin of 584-282, which left you wondering why the distinguished panel of international judges, led by Loretta Preska, Chief Judge of the Southern District of New York – who found him guilty so you know you’ve got a hanging judge if you get her – could find any shred of evidence against the philosopher, other than his contempt for their profession. During his trial, he tweaked his judge’s noses and destroyed their impartiality – while at the same time paying the ultimate respect to the law by saying he’d rather accept injustice than go against the law. You could almost hear him doing a low-keyed version of one of Al Pacino’s roles as a frustrated lawyer screaming at them, “You’re out of order! You’re out of order! The whole trial is out of order!”
But if the Trial of Socrates was a grabber, the best one – if it ever happens, and this being Greece, where only immigrants and poor people go to jail, don’t bet on it – the Trial of Tsochatzopoulos would be the hottest ticket in town and you could fill the Onassis Center 10 times over. Akis Tsohatzopoulos, 72, is the former Greek Defense Minister charged with in a money-laundering scheme and with expropriating every euro he could get his hands on, maybe as much as 47 million of them or more, demanding bribes for contracts for submarines and other necessities of keeping a country’s security safe.
Tsochatzopoulos, who probably fancied himself a Greek god and would prefer to live in a pantheon, has been in jail for a while now, much to his surprise and everyone else’s in a country where politicians and the rich have virtual immunity from all wrongdoing. He was arrested primarily as a ploy to distract voters from the May 6 elections and pretend that the government was serious about going after corruption. But when that resulted in a stalemated result and new elections were set for June 17, it meant that he had to wait longer until the almost-inevitable headline that he would be set free on a technicality, such as the statute of limitations running out on greed. This is a man who allegedly tinkered with his country’s security so much that the cost of bribes apparently cut into the workability of the submarines, although someone should have noticed the German company building them put in screen doors to save money.
SPENDING LIKE DRUNKEN MINISTERS
The best show in town for now has been the news clips illustrating his diary and written demands to “send the money now!,” and that a million euros ($1.25 million) that day would help tide him over but not too much because his much-younger wife, Vicky Stamati, 49, was spending the likes of $50,000 a day, but only on necessities such as $43,773 for two sofas, $27,000 for a coffee table, $23,213 for curtains, and $3,139 for a sash to tie them with. Sounds reasonable when you live in a mansion the size of the nearly-adjacent New Acropolis Museum on Billionaire’s Alley under the Acropolis itself, except that she (why was she even working?) declared an income of $31,964, but that was 2006 so she probably retired after re-decorating the $1.8 million mansion she and Sugar Daddy lived.
He was taking her on trips around Greece, staying in palaces, dropping $500 for lunch, $1,000 for dinner and living like royalty with his young queen by his side. He could have done better and cheaper by paying some of the human trafficking victims from Africa who work as prostitutes downtown, not far from where police patrols stand on street corners waiting for anarchists. The prostitutes’ sofas are a lot cheaper too but you need to take a shower in Listerine before you go home.
Stamati is in jail now too, although pleading with the judges – too bad not the same ones who convicted Socrates – to be allowed to return home because she’s a mother, just like hundreds of thousands of others who can’t even afford milk in the age of austerity because people like she and her husband (allegedly) stole millions from the public treasury. When you get bribes, the contractors beef up the cost of the contracts accordingly so it’s the taxpayers who foot the bill for avarice.
Knowing the fix was in, Socrates put the shame back on the people who wrongly judged him, 500 of them, 280 of whom found him guilty and told them, “If injustice is shameful, so likewise every act of it; but no disgrace can it bring on me, that others have not seen that I was innocent.” A preening Preska, playing to the audience with a long, written speech that read as if it was prepared before she heard the evidence, didn’t buy it. “Socrates comes before us feigning humility, yet demonstrating arrogance,” she said. “He is a dangerous subversive,” she added, calling him “treasonous,” and voting to convict him of the crime of original thought, maybe because she didn’t have one. Even the polite audience gave her a few catcalls because Greeks are a little short on patience with arrogance these days – the kind she displayed.
The real subversion and treason (allegedly) was that done by Tsochatzopoulos, whose crimes corrupted not just the young but everyone around him, his gang of associates who plundered Greece, the fellow politicians who allowed him to steal (in an ominous note to them he said, “I know everything,”) and an injustice system that let him escape until Greece needed a scapegoat. He’s the enemy of democracy, and instead of that fine champagne he ordered at the luxurious wedding in Paris with Vicky, at a 5-Star hotel with a view of the Eiffel Tower (why didn’t he get married in Greece?), a lot of Greeks think that perhaps his next drink should be a Greek specialty reserved for real traitors, a little something called Hemlock, but that’s a bit impious. And you know what happens to the irreverent in Greece.
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