Not only am I not making this up, to borrow the words of writer Dave Barry, I am sure that I am neither creative nor imaginative enough to have done so.
Once again we are dealing with the debris of the EB-5 scandal in Vermont, in which scores of millions of dollars of alien money were stolen from immigrant investors who wanted to buy their way into legal status in this country, as we have been reporting for years.
Some of their money was used by Florida con man Ariel Quiros to buy a luxurious condo at 400 Fifth Avenue, near the Empire State Building. On two different occasions, in 2013 and 2014, then-Governor of Vermont, Peter Shumlin (D), stayed at Quiros' glorious pad without paying any rent, according to a recent article in VtDigger.
Now the assertive court-appointed trustee for the case, Michael Goldberg, has managed to sell the condo for close to $4 million, money to be used to restore some of the thefts. As VtDigger reported: "The two buyers, according to court records, are King Ting Leung and King Ho Eric Leung of Beijing, China."