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#551 – London 2008 #58 – Mrs. Craig’s Opinion of Project PayLamb – “Extra-what?”
As I mentioned at the beginning of the trip, I’m planning on staying on in London and start a payment-processor for online poker transactions. Because the government acts like that’s against the law, I’m going to (a) get rich, and (b) become an exile. I didn’t tell Jo Anne much about this because I didn’t want her to be implicated.
Well, guess what? She’s not thrilled about the idea. But she didn’t threaten to divorce me or kill me. (It’s not for nothing that we’ve been married 27 years.) I think she somehow suspects this involves another woman, though, beyond Dame Fortune – who I am amorously pursuing – there is no other woman. She’s skeptical and has not committed to joining me, but she did bring up a worrisome matter that I had not considered.
She is, like me, a former lawyer and clearly a more level-headed thinker than I in these matters.
Extradition.
I don’t know how I neglected to think of this beofre. I can only say that I was a CLASS ACTION lawyer, and matters of international law are somewhat “foreign” to me.
I take seriously my current commitment to Full Tilt (and, of course, you readers) so I don’t really have the time to employ a barrister or solicitor or whatever they call them here. I did, however, do some quick legal research over the internet and found the following “discouraging” facts:
1. Extradition is the process of one government getting a person delivered who is in another jurisdiction and committed a crime or is being charged with committing a crime.
2. To my benefit, the U.S. has to have a treaty allowing for the extradition of any person in a foreign country. Matters of national sovereignty prevent the U.S. from just plucking people out of another country.
3. To my dispair, the U.S. and Great Britain have a web of extradition treaties, the most recent signed in 2003. It was signed as part of a cross-border effort to “combat terrorism” and I know whenever the government uses the t-word that its power is pretty much absolute and anyone who complains or opposes looks soft on terror.
4. What about France? Don’t they hate the U.S. government? Not even to abrogate several lifetimes of extradition treaties.
5. Switzerland? They’re not even in the U.N. No good.
6. Heck, we have extradition treaties with just about everywhere that’s nice to live. We even have extradition treaties with Cuba and Haiti and Colombia, not that I’d want to locate any of those places.
7. I did find a list of about 70 countries with which the U.S. currently does NOT have extradition treaties. Unfortunately, my instinct is that many of them are hellholes. Do they even have internet access in places like Senegal, Ethiopia, Marshall Islands, Mongolia, and Niger? If I’m starting an internet business, I have to be somewhere that has a good connection. And it’s probably a good idea I stay away from counties where the U.S. has fought a war or are otherwise regularly described as “war-torn”, such as “war-torn Afghanistan,” “war-torn Angola,” “war-torn Bosnia,” “war-torn Cambodia,” “war-torn Rwanda,” and so on. Djibouti? Libya? Uganda? Kosovo? Moldova? Myanmar?
No wonder Jo Anne is reluctant.
I’ll try to work through this, but it definitely complicates things.
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