My heart sinks when I write a review.

Not because I dislike writing them. You see, I write and translate for a not-insignificant part of my living. Rather, I worry about the possibility that someone will think I was paid to write the review; to slant it a certain way; or to make it an outright hit piece or puff piece.

And so on the basis of that worry I decided to do a sort of review by way of non-fiction autobiographical piece.

That's literally all this is. A retelling of events. Now, some people will benefit from it, surely, in a commercial sense. But those people aren't competitors of the firm being reviewed; they're not foreign or hostile governments; and they're not blackmailers or thieves or hustlers. The people who benefit from this review, and from the information it contains, are only its clients — who will now have an edge in obtaining better service — the service they earned and pay for and deserve — and its employees, who will hopefully thereafter be better empowered by management to deliver that level of service.

With that in mind, I'd like to offer all readers of this review a discount code of sorts: "Coon-Ren". This code, which is a combination of slang from the southern USA and the word for 'person' in Chinese and refers to the firm's COO, Karen Sutton, is somethng you can simply state at the beginning of any transaction with the firm, along with a link to this article, and signifies that you are effectively now an insider of a number of things to which even some billionaires are not typically privy.

And this, therefore, entitles you to a discount.

Someone at a Christmas Eve dinner once gave me what I found to be a rather banal lecture on "entitlement thinking". This, naturally, had to do with entitlements as they typically pertain to poor people. Rather than rouse her ire, however, I have tonight made the decision to offer an entitlement that effecively pertains, for the most part, only to rich people.

That entitlement, specifically, is that all clients of the firm who have this information and this code incur no transaction cost. None whatsoever. If they refuse — take your business elsewhere, write the press, write your congressman, write the board and CEO.

Don't worry, you'll get your discount.

***

Most people begin their company reviews with an early experience of the actual company: an interview, an internship, perhaps a company visit, etc. I began with none of these.

You see, my experience with Sotheby's began with a veritable gang-rape by an intelligence agency, a top business school, the Times of London, and a private security firm that is still actually ongoing — one that has now undoubtedly cost the firm and the two governments with which it is most closely associated enormous amounts of money.

No, I'm not making this up; I'd be crazy to do so; and in fact just a basic level of self-defense against these people, these criminals, has already cost me my marriage to a woman I loved dearly, my ability to even safely travel to the country where I was born, and my family — who act now as though I should just commit suicide for their own commercial benefit.

My journey to Sotheby's, you see, began in business school. This is important, because I am an American who finished London Business School's Masters in Management programme with the intent to use it as a route to move to the United Kingdom permanently. This, in turn, is also important, because I am the grandson of two high-ranking Cold War era US Government figures, one a high-ranking officer in the US Army Corps of Engineers who later launched the first international videoconferencing satellite, SBS-1, in 1980; and a Ph.D economist who went on to hold major leadership positions at several universities. Perhaps just as significantly, I am the son and nephew of other prominent New York and Washington DC professionals, all of whom were ousted from their positions during the '90s as part of a post-Cold War purge of nearly all prominent or potentially prominent US Government figures of Central and Eastern European ancestry.

I found it nearly impossible to get job interviews for anything while in business school, presumably due to the above. And what the then-Dean of London Business School decided to do to me, because he is a completely insane degenerate idiot, was to literally have The Times do an article on me as part of their special MBA feature. The Times reported most details I gave them incorrectly, and basically made up a bunch of things about how I was some sort of charity case from a poor family who "aspired to play and own rare violins" or something like that. Nothing could have been further from the truth: I ran my own business as a violin dealer in high school and in university, but never aspired to collect instruments or do anything else that the Times claimed, which apparently was done in order to market me to future Sotheby's clients. It was almost like being sold into slavery, in a way.

When I finished business school, I took a job at a small financial services marketing firm that I found via a Cambridge-educated rep for an HR consultancy whom I met socially. And as it happened, someone did their very best to stop me from taking this job: specifically, the UK Border Agency, or someone with access to their offices, 'lost' my passport while I was in the process of receiving a residency permit. And my then-employer was exceptionally kind to wait over three months for the situation to be resolved, which only happened, as it were, following a letter and follow-up exchange with my local member of Parliament.

The company where I'd been hired on soon came under a multi-pronged attack by the US Government's security services soon thereafter. As part of my compensation package, I had been promised equity in the company. And what happened instead — in the course of just three months — is that the American credit card company Capital One purchased a major share of the company and took over the equity that had been promised to new hires.

Then the business units I worked on came under attack. Odd types of sabotage to our partner companies and service providers began to occur — things that I as a business analyst could concretetely identify and diagnose, but never control. It was terrifying for me. I wanted to immigrate, to build a new life in a safe and civilised place, but someone with quite a lot of money and resources seemed to be taking a vested interest in preventing that from happening. And then someone poisoned me.

I even know exactly how.

At the time, I did a fair bit of entertaining. I also had a very consistent diet, as it happened: free fruit and bread for breakfast at the office; Sainsbury's store-brand vegetable soup as the base for most lunches and dinners; and an high-quality, low-cost French red wine called "Longue-Dog" practically all the time at least a few times a week, which featured a red dachshund that wrapped all the way around the label.

In the beginning of February 2012 I began to experience a number of unusual symptoms, the most notable of which were a) an unusually high histamine response (response to allergens) b) hair rapidly falling out and c) a near-total inability to sleep.

And so I — because the Russian multi-entry visa I had at the time had been invalidated with the 'loss' of my passport when geting my UK residency permit — quit my job and got on a plane to Kiev, Ukraine, which at the time still had a reasonably stable government run by a responsible, competent Russian loyalist named Viktor Yanukovich. I had been with the company just six months. But in Kiev I was able to sufficiently detox, unmolested, and begin functioning normally again in a physiological sense.

Running out of money several weeks later I returned to Florida, where my mother fell for some sort of provocation and took me to dinner at an Italian restaurant at which my food was poisoned with what I presume to have been an extremely high dosage of an hallucinogenic drug, along with something intended to boost histamine response (this increases transit of molecules across the blood-brain barrier). Under these conditions I was extremely vulnerable, and I knew it: it was time to go. I got together what money I could, and made plans to fake my death with a certain level of in-built plausible deniability and leave the USA for good.

My plan was to stage a car accident that looked far more serious than it was, walk away from it, and let the authorities be accused of my disappearance thereafter. As a fail-safe, I would take a moderate dose of painkillers — enough to pass out and be unresponsive following a crash, if necessary. If all went well, though, I would simply force myself to vomit and be on my way.

I picked an ideal car and spot for the crash — a 2007 Audi A4 2.0T versus a large, old royal palm tree in Boca Raton, Florida. The Audi's longitudinally mounted engine meant I could hit the tree at enough speed to give the impression of a loss of control at high speed, without risking much in the way of an actual injury to myself. It seemed perfect. Of course, it's sometimes difficult or even impossible to plan for every single variable. And in this case, the confounding variable was an off-duty ambulance that pulled directly into a gas station just a few yards from my palm tree.

It was a terrifying moment. I had already taken the pills and therefore had only a limited number of minutes of full consciousness left before I would need to either vomit up the entire liquid content of my stomach or pass out. I did an half-mile loop in hopes the ambulance would leave and, as I returned, I did not see it at the station at first glance. So I did it. I hit the tree straight on-center with the engine block at about 50mph.

The car was totally destroyed. I was fine. But with what I determined was just a few minutes of consciousness left, there was a very obvious problem: none of the doors would open. As I tried to change that, with no success, I considered a last-ditch option that would leave behind a far-from-ideal amount of evidence: kicking out the windshield.

Before I could give that any consideration, though, my options began dwindling further as someone — paramedics, I learned — began doing this for me, ripping out the windshield. Now feeling disoriented and with a police car on-site for accident response, I pulled a metaphorical gun: the USA's security services were planning a coup in Ukraine in just a few months' time (this, of course, was true and happened within the year) and I needed to fake my death and get out of the country. Shortly thereafter I passed out.

I awoke in hospital to a visibly confused group of doctors and a very angry, barely-literate policeman. He originally wanted to charge me with a DUI until someone with better judgment intervened.

Now grounded in the USA, and with the situation producing favorable commercial results for my mother, who received a large signing bonus to move to another firm after having basically been impoverished by criminal elements in the USA's security services for an extended period of time, I decided to take some time off and take science classes at a local university with the intent to eventually become a doctor. And of course I did extremely well academically.

But shortly thereafter, someone powerful made a choice on my behalf yet again. I had a biology professor who began giving me low grades on tests — Bs — totally illegitimately while denying me the chance to dispute the results. At the same time, the 'opportunity' to run the Sotheby's auction house office on Palm Beach arose. And of course I took it. It was a chance to be a part of history; to use my background in the business of auction houses, in trade of historical objects, etc. I was just 23 and it was indeed fun for a short time. But the firm was badly run — by a fat loser pothead from Vermont named Bill Ruprecht, and his mob-connected, corrupt and incompetent cronies who, during my tenure there, found themselves running up against an obnoxious nouveau riche hedge fund manager by the name of Dan Loeb whom I had nothing whatsoever to do with.

Aside from having adopted an extremely wondeful dog from the local shelter, I was very unhappy. I was barely making anything — just $44,000 per year in an extremely expensive part of the country — and then, after a year of record performance as the sole employee behind the firm's most profitable regional office, having generated over US$3.5 million in commission revenue, a record, Coon-Ren and my boss refused to promote me after lying outright on internal governance documents to the effect that my office had missed a supposedly-impossible target when in fact I had provably beat it by over 10%. And this, of course, is why the SEC are now involved — because the company effectively has no internal governance, just an ill-tempered Irish peasant who thrives on antagonising her more productive employees. Reading their financial statements is near-worthless.

So I quit. I was already engaged to be married to someone who had a wonderful opportunity waiting in Seattle; meanwhile, Sotheby's was still under attack by Loeb and cronies, who had seemingly given up on making any meaningful changes to the business and settled for better event invitations for themselves; and I wanted to have a more normal, quiet corporate job and live a normal life.

Instead, I was then effectively locked out of the labor market by both Coon-Ren and Andrew 'Anus' Likierman, a Romanian field peasant who was somehow knighted in the early 2000s for reasons unclear to me and then became Dean of London Business School and then was implicated in the LIBOR-rigging scandal a few years ago but never prosecuted, and they now appear to have conspired to make things appear on background checks and HR verifications as though I had lied to prospective employers about having a master's degree and having worked at Sotheby's so that it would be easy for them to retain me and within the arts job market. And this behavior of theirs is, of course, also illegal. The only proof I retained consisted of several old auction house catalogues bearing my name as the Palm Beach representative and my LBS diploma, which bore only my middle and last name. Click the photos - they're real, and were even taken at my old desk at Sotheby's.

I also used to give talks about the art market for the firm. Here's a flyer for one of those.

Shortly thereafter, someone poisoned me again, with serious consequences; and my entrepreneurial business interests — both as the CMO of a small biotech company and as the inventor of a 3D-printable concert quality violin — were severely and repeatedly sabotaged by a private security firm and the NSA, which you can read about elsewhere on my website. My wife and I divorced, mostly for her safety, and I fled the USA, first to Russia, then to Switzerland after US interests carried out substantial acts of criminality against me in Russia, where I was initially granted asylum and then had my residency permit revoked as a result of corruption and diplomatic machinations with the US government, after which I fled to Russia again — something only possible because the Bern city police refused to confiscate my passport or deport me.

And so, in short, there are several key conclusions for clients and prospective employees of Sotheby's that I can offer.

First that Coon-Ren, who remains in Sotheby's employ ever since having apparently fucked Al Taubman for the job back in the '80s, is a total fucking lunatic. More importantly, she is totally uneducated, a terrible businessperson, and involved in all kinds of organized crime, often for dollar amounts that really don't seem worth it to anyone sane. Even more importantly, Coon-Ren is the first generation of her family to even work indoors, and if you know that, the rest just follows naturally. Your transactions are absolutely not ever safe under her watch. HR people talk a lot about 'fit' and 'purpose' for roles. Well, Karen's 'fit' ducks out of human existence in Dublin brothels circa 1910 or so. If you believe anything different, well, history is not on your side.

So if you transact with Sotheby's, and by extension, with Coon-Ren — show her this. Because she, along with Andrew 'Anus' Likierman is responsible for this situation. And it is literally, no joke, the biggest Western security breach since the end of the Cold War, bigger than Edward Snowden, who is nothing more than a retard emblematic of the excesses of the Bush administration. And unlike Snowden, I cannot be jailed, because all I have done is to alert the foreign governments that protect me to the USA and UK's human rights abuses. Currently I can even travel almost anywhere except Canada (and even that should be fixed shortly). I want to be clear. I am ultraconservative and a die-hard monarchist. Hold a gun to my head — I will never under any circumstances betray my former clients. But you can and should hold a gun to Coon-Ren's big fat Irish field peasant head whenever and however possible because, well, you can, and she deserves it because she's extremely fortunate she isn't in jail. Any time. Need to negotiate a deal? I'll blow Coon-Ren's oversized Irish wigger peasant head off via telephone in any deal room in 30 seconds on your behalf. For free. Call me: +7 925 038 08 53.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do business with them. But they need to make it very attractive for you, and if they refuse, you should go anywhere else. Literally anywhere. So use the code.

Coon-Ren. Coon-a-fucking-loonerren. Cooneranian Coon-Ren Cooneran. Coon-Ren. That's who she is. Use the code.