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Runaway Mogul

On the western coast of Africa, in a rambling Liberian ghetto called Chocolate City, a former cannibal is sitting under the shade of a tin roofed hut explaining how he sacrificed humans to placate a jungle god. didn see it as cruel at the time, the squat, muscular man says in high quality replica handbags his thick patois, a bead of sweat inching down his grim face. saw it as a mediating role between the deity and the people. congregation of about 20 teenage boys an assortment of reformed killers and drug addicts sits on plastic chairs and listens Fake Designer Bags raptly as the man in a baseball cap and brown military shirt sleeves confesses to leading a militia of drug fueled child soldiers to kill a purported 20,000 people during a horrific period of unrest in the 1980s and and to eating children from his own tribe to gain spiritual favor in battle. Until he found Jesus in a burst of white light shortly after hacking his last victim to death he merely saw it as part of the job description. time I do this sacrifice, he says, battle immediately turns against the enemy. Or turns in Designer Fake Bags favor of us. They would start running. also believed nudity was cheap replica handbags his armor against enemy bullets his wartime moniker, General Butt Naked.

Replica Designer Handbags The three white Americans sitting alongside Butt Naked are duly sobered by the testimony. And in the raw reality of replica handbags online the moment, there is the hanging question of high quality replica handbags why their leader, Tom Freston, the spike haired media mogul who helped create MTV and once ran the film and TV company Viacom, has brought them here, to a bleak neighborhood in a failed cheap replica handbags and lawless state, to meet a murderer. Freston and his companions, part of a larger delegation of pampered Westerners in SUVs who arrived in Liberia about four hours ago, couldn look more conspicuous if they been dropped out of a time machine. Replica Designer Handbags

Fake Handbags But shock, it turns out, is exactly what Freston came here for. Technically speaking, he is in Liberia as chairman of the ONE Campaign, the nonprofit co founded by his friend Bono, which flew in the delegation of Washington politicos to witness the good works of the G8 countries in fighting AIDS and malaria. The group, according to the itinerary, will visit a hospital, a factory, and a farm, examples of successful development efforts sponsored by Western powers, and then fly east to Ghana to see a rural schoolhouse and help the Peace Corps install high quality replica handbags mosquito nets in a remote village. Fake Handbags

replica Purse The Butt Naked meeting is not on the agenda. Rather, it a freelance caper cooked up by Freston, the executive who introduced us to reality TV 20 years ago with Real World, to provide a bit of garish spectacle to an otherwise earnest mission. It is, in Hollywood ese, a Tom Freston Production. Freston procured Butt Naked cellphone number from a Replica Handbags friend and suggested it might be amusing if, while in Liberia, he introduced him to our other traveling companion the right wing Christian leader Ralph Reed. replica Purse

Handbags Replica The archconservative evangelical meets the born again cannibal? would be like an Ali G move, says Freston. Handbags Replica

aaa replica designer handbags And so here we are, aaa replica designer handbags sitting with this monster turned minister and his Christian converts, homeless kids he found living on the streets (some sleeping in empty caskets in the local graveyard), who stare at us with expressions of almost preposterous hope replica Purse in this postwar wasteland where electricity is scarce and plumbing is nearly nonexistent (as is, apparently, justice for war criminals). Ralph Reed had little idea what he was getting into when https://www.whhandbags.com he agreed to the unscheduled outing, and his Replica Bags jaw is appropriately loosened in horror as Freston had planned. But Freston looks pretty shell shocked himself. quite a story, is all he can manage to say. aaa replica designer handbags

Replica Bags Wholesale Equally shocking, however, is how the presence of Freston the big time American media mogul, whose network of powerful friends includes Rupert Murdoch, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Bob Iger, and Tom Cruise, automatically turns this situation into a kind of business meeting. Reed says he knows a couple of evangelical churches that might like to meet the reformed man eater. And the reformed man eater, who is now known as Joshua Blahyi, is happy to oblige, handing Freston and Reed copies of his published memoir and the documentary about him that aired at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. people still think I should be hanged, he notes. Replica Bags Wholesale

Wholesale Replica Bags Before he goes, Freston sidles up to Butt Naked for a photo op, a postcard he email to Bono and other friends. We then climb into the SUVs, roll up the windows, and heave a collective sigh of relief. Freston says he was too stunned to ask the pressing follow up question: does human flesh taste like? couldn believe my ears, he says. felt like I been taken back to some prehistoric time. all things considered, he declares the outing good little adventure, as high quality replica handbags he settles into Designer Fake Bags the SUV. He pulls out a bottle of antibacterial gel from his Fake Designer Bags safari jacket, squirts a little into our palms, and laughs: been shaking hands with General Butt Naked! pagebreak >After more than 30 years in the entertainment business, Tom Freston knows how to make the talent feel at ease. Described by friends as a mash up of Jack Kerouac and Jack Welch, who weds a Zelig like talent for friendship to a pirate eye for opportunity, Freston saw his job at MTV Networks as making people like Jon Stewart or Bono or Beyonc feel as if they were stars in a corporate firmament he was running on their behalf. In Fake Designer Bags Freston world, where everything and everyone are potential content to Wholesale Replica Bags be provided to somebody somewhere, Ralph Reed and Butt Naked might very well be the next and Butt Head. would never say, that guy is a rich, right wing Republican, aaa replica designer handbags therefore he my enemy,’ says Bill Flanagan, a longtime friend from MTV. the same way, he go hang out with a cannibal. so he can hang out with Reed and other American evangelicals. (Freston says he try, though the murderous coup might be an issue.) Wholesale Replica Bags

A child of the 1960s, Freston spent his late twenties and early thirties as a clothing exporter living in Afghanistan and India until he lost his fortune and stumbled, serendipitously, into a job at a nascent cable channel in 1980. The rest is the history of MTV. Freston would run the network for 18 years, turning it into a global powerhouse by introducing reality TV and hip hop to mainstream audiences, expanding MTV into Asia and Europe, and eventually overseeing the parent company, Viacom, one of the largest film and TV conglomerates on Earth (including Daily Show, Nick at Nite, Spike TV, and Paramount Pictures).

Replica Bags Seven years ago, however, Designer Replica Bags Freston got fired from Viacom, extinguishing his media mogul mojo and throwing him into a post power player identity crisis. As he told a crowd of college students in 2007: I am giving a commencement speech when I back Replica Bags Wholesale right where I started, wondering, like you, God what the hell am I going to do now?’ Freston were a typical corporate chieftain, he might have sought a new corporate perch and tried recovering all the trappings of power: the easy access to celebrity and fame, the private jet, the company cars, the armies of assistants to micromanage his every waking minute minutes he would spend determining who gets paid the millions and appears on TV and movie screens around the globe. But he didn do that. Instead, he has tried reinventing himself as something more idiosyncratic: an independently wealthy media broker with an assortment of off grid replica handbags china interests that, together, seem to circle back to a previous incarnation of Tom Freston the one who freewheeled his way to fun and profit in the 1970s and then lucked into the best job in American media. Replica Bags

In the past several years, he has become an adviser and investor in the insouciant male centric media company Vice, which he likens to Replica Bags an early MTV, and a consultant and board member to Moby high quality replica handbags Group, a fast growing TV company in Afghanistan replica Purse that Freston also likens to an early MTV. Simultaneously, he helped re engineer the antipoverty campaigns founded by Bono, a friend Freston helped make famous in the early days of MTV. His new schedule has made him a nonstop traveler to the Middle East and Africa, places he roamed in his twenties, and later as a CEO expanding the global reach of MTV.

At 67, Freston has the wealth and access to seed youthful new media ventures and concoct global adventures worthy of his own legend. It is a maze of ghastly brothels and drug dens crammed cheek to jowl with adhoc dwellings of scrap tin and wood along a beach that seconds as a public toilet.

like squeezing a slum in before breakfast, says Freston cheerfully as a local NGO worker named Macintosh walks us through narrow alleys flowing with sewage. Grave looking Replica Bags Wholesale villagers under makeshift awnings eye us suspiciously from cavernous doorways as naked children peek out with curious smiles. Freston, in this dank milieu, sticks out like an exclamation point in a white linen shirt and knee high rubber boots, a giant rainbow colored golf umbrella hoisted over his head. is the bottom of the barrel, man, he observes.

high quality replica handbags A few years ago, you would not have found Tom Freston here in Monrovia. He was too busy at the very top of the barrel, Fake Designer Bags green lighting multimillion dollar movie deals and pacifying stars like Ozzy Osbourne and Tom Cruise, his virtual employees at Viacom. high quality replica handbags

wholesale replica designer handbags But everything changed in 2006 when, following an afternoon playing tennis with Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel in Los Angeles, Freston Fake Designer Bags came home to phone messages from his cantankerous boss, the then 83 year old Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone. the hell are you? Redstone snarled. easier to get ahold of President Bush than it is you me, call me, call me. drove to Redstone manse on nearby Mulholland, sat down in his living room full of exotic fish, and was summarily fired. Chief among Freston failings, in Redstone estimation, was missing the chance to buy social media website MySpace before Rupert Murdoch News Corp. snatched it up for $580 million. (MySpace, of course, would go on to lose many millions and get sold for roughly $35 million to a group of investors, including Justin Timberlake.) But poetic justice would come only later. Despite his usually unflappable disposition, Freston was stunned. never been fired in my life, he tells me. anything. I never failed at anything I tried. would, of course, be a massive exit package to soften the blow $85 million in stock options and other compensation. As the provocateurs at Vice Media put it in a recent video roast they assembled for him, Freston was on the streets replica bags with nothing more than a boatload of money, three huge mansions, a sweet record collection, and nothing else. could laugh at that. He was, after all, the man who ran the company responsible for Park, a foundational text of modern American irony. But he was also a man who been inside the same institution for two decades. been there for 25 years, a quarter of a century, my whole life work. It had been the greatest run and ride, he says. wholesale replica designer handbags

Designer Fake Bags When it came to a dead stop at age 60, KnockOff Handbags Freston admits that he was left with a curious emptiness. always imagined myself somehow as an electron around some atom, and you just, like, bouncing around and spinning, he says. was a never ending supply of places to go, people to see, things to do, and fitting it all in became kind of an art. So I never really got grounded. I never really spent a lot of time you know, like, zero being introspective at all. the clue to Freston future was waiting for him when he walked out of Sumner Redstone house that fateful day: In the driveway was the car he owned for 30 years, a 1975 BMW 2002 he purchased new for $5,800 when he was a long haired clothing exporter in Afghanistan. longest relationship of my life is with this car, he aaa replica designer handbags says. In 1972, Freston had ditched a straight job in advertising for the open roads of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and India. Without a plan, he learned how to find opportunity in the serendipity of travel. was the most transforming year of my life, he says. Designer Fake Bags

purse replica handbags And, it so happens, it was a blueprint for a reinvention. purse replica handbags

Replica Handbags Viacom, in a sense, had become for Freston what his own hometown had been back in the 1960s: a luxurious trap. He grown up in the Waspy enclave of Rowayton, Connecticut, a commuter suburb where five o cocktails and Frank Sinatra were a way of life. His father, a PR executive at a paper company, had no interest in life outside the city limits. whole youth, we went on a one day trip to Mystic Seaport, says Freston. was the only trip we ever took, and it was up and back in one day. Some smelly fucking whaling ships. Rowayton gave Freston a distinct taste for the good life. When he got a job as an umbrella boy at the Wee Burn Country Club at age 16, meet all these kids my age who didn have to work and dressed better and drove cars their parents had bought them. It seemed outstanding to me. worldview was recalibrated in the summer Fake Designer Bags of 1965 when, while working as a bartender at a leafy upstate resort at Lake George, in New York, he met a group of bohemian dropouts who read Jack Kerouac, smoked pot, and grooved to the going hit a Rolling Stone. had a free life; they make money and meet all the girls, he recalls. was a whole subculture for me, very alluring. at his sleepy college of St. Michael in Vermont, Freston became the countercultural Johnny Appleseed to his more provincial friends, growing his hair long, subscribing to Stone, and rolling the joints. Replica Handbags

cheap replica handbags He was a natural entrepreneur, organizing for profit keg parties featuring live bands. As manager of the school cafeteria, he assigned the dozen available jobs to himself and a couple of other friends, did all the work, and split the pay for 10 ghost employees. had operations and schemes going all the time, says his brother, Bill Freston. was always the deal. Undermining the system. they such good boys meanwhile, a lot of drinking and smoking dope and partying. I don think that changed much. graduation, Freston applied to business school at New York University, primarily to avoid Vietnam. But he was turned on again this time to Peter Drucker, the business management consultant, who taught a course in innovation and change, two concepts that seemed radical in the buttoned down world of business. knew I wasn a painter or a musician or anything, so if I wanted to be creative, I could gravitate toward that, Freston explains. is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way. I started getting excited. Maybe there a place for a creative businessman. 1969, diploma in hand, Freston rewarded himself with a cross country ramble, including a layover in the Virgin Islands, where he tended bar and tried LSD for the first time. ( do that again, he told his female companion the next day.) But he returned to New York and went straight, getting a job at an advertising firm, replica handbags china Benton Bowles. He chafed at the square life. got increasingly disillusioned with it and talked to friends on the outside who were living a free life, and I say, I kind of trapped here.’ Freston left for Europe on a yearlong plane ticket, with no plans other than aaa replica designer handbags to Handbags Replica see exotic sights and chase girls. parents were fucking appalled, he says. cheap replica handbags

Invariably, Freston found opportunity. In Greece he met gorgeous hippie chick on the beach who was selling Indian fabrics to German tourists and making a killing. kept thinking, Fake Handbags I could do this on a larger scale,’ says Freston.

He spent the next eight years building a clothing business from scratch, traveling around India and Afghanistan looking purse replica handbags for fabrics and developing women fashion designs for Western department stores. The company was called Hindu Kush, named for the Afghan mountain range but also a strain of Oriental cannabis with which Freston was not unfamiliar. He opened a factory in Delhi with a local merchant he befriended (and still knows) and established a headquarters in Afghanistan, where he could live like a hippie king in Kabul, complete with his own butler and servant. He threw lavish parties for NGO workers, beatnik drifters, and soldiers of fortune he met during his travels. By the late Seventies, Freston says, Hindu Kush was a operation. and all through the United States. We were making a lot of money. I couldn believe it. It was a countercultural capitalist thing. Working like crazy. More than I would have in a regular job. came a violent coup in Kabul in April 1978, which forced Freston to flee to Peshawar until the fighting blew over. It didn however. The new Communist regime, he says, began killing off local KnockOff Handbags businessmen, so he shut down his Afghan operation, which was 30 percent of his business, and fled to India. hated to be shut out of a place I truly loved, he says.

replica handbags online Within a few months, the Carter administration enacted a new trade policy that put a cap on Indian clothing imports, which froze Freston business midstream, leaving him with a big inventory and nobody to sell it to. As quickly as it had begun, Hindu Kush was kaput, leaving Freston $500,000 in debt. replica handbags online

replica handbags china of a sudden, I wiped out and it 1979, he says. came back and said, got to find another way of life.’ pagebreak >We on a bus rambling up the Cape Coast of Ghana to Elmina, site of the world largest slave castle, which was run by the Dutch in the 17th and 18th centuries. The road is clogged with motorcycles, some with four people astride them, and brightly painted minibuses spitting black smoke. Street sellers flash their wares at our bus as lanky women with gigantic baskets of fruit on their heads saunter through the Fake Handbags heat. replica handbags china

Designer Replica Bags Tom Freston is sitting up front, headphones on, punching out emails to producer Brian Grazer about a script idea involving John Glenn and Charles Lindbergh. Designer Replica Bags

Fake Designer Bags We flew here from Liberia on a borrowed 767 with cream colored chaise longues and private sleeping quarters. There was a lunch of grilled shrimp and cabernet. From the grimmest of replica Purse slums in Liberia to opulence at 30,000 feet in the space of a few hours it the kind of cultural and socioeconomic whiplash that Freston is used to. He isn replica handbags online one to go native. He carries Hollywood and Manhattan in his BlackBerry 24/7. Even in the wilds of Chocolate City, where chickens and stray dogs roam muddy roads and children play in abandoned buildings, Freston wears Prada sneakers and carries a Jack Spade bag. Fake Designer Bags

If there anything that seems to acclimate Freston, it music. From the back of the bus, I text him: it going? He texts back: da music, mon. Very nice West African playlist soundtrack. he tells me it his favorite compilation of Ghanaian highlife music, The and the Gun, from 2003. had an unbelievable scene in the Seventies and Eighties, he says. whole psychedelic era, garage bands, all kinds of shit. Luckily for him, while he was in Afghanistan, his brother had become an executive at Columbia Records: going to see Bruce Springsteen at the Bottom Line, and I say, I could do this. This looks like fun,’ Freston says.

KnockOff Handbags For Freston, snagging a job interview with the not yet named MTV was a stroke of unimaginable luck. said, looking for people who have no experience in television,’ recalls Freston. said, your guy. They didn even have television where I just spent the last eight years They all assumed I was a drug dealer. was MTV fifth hire, soon to become a business partner to a whole generation of pop stars, from U2 to Fab 5 Freddy, whose careers he would help mint in the music video era. Early on, he found himself at a ski resort in Gstaad, Switzerland, where David Bowie had agreed to shoot the famous Want My MTV promo clip. in the sauna with Bowie, Freston recalls, who else is there? Paul McCartney! Everyone had towels on. took him about four years to pay down his debt. Seven years in, he was CEO. While he helped develop the channel, Freston imprinted the corporate culture Designer Fake Bags with the free range ethos he learned as a bootstrapping exporter. has that easy, affable nature that rock rollers like to be around because they a little anxious around obvious corporate type people, says Bono. belies that he expert in a boardroom, and that is his secret weapon. Tom is highly organized KnockOff Handbags.