December 7, 2011

Wyclef Stole That Haitian Earthquake Money


So it turns out Wyclef pinched all that cash that was donated to his charity, Yele Haiti. Tut. The below article has been pulled from Byron Crawford via the NY Times.
I can't believe Wyclef Jean stole that Haitian earthquake money. Not.
The whole purpose of these hip-hop fake charities is to (a) decrease your tax liability to the IRS, and (b) funnel the vast majority of the funds donated into your own pockets and into the pockets of your weed carriers, business partners, ne'er do well relatives and what have you. It's the textbook definition of a win-win: You get a shedload of money, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie get to look like they donated something to charity, and you all get to pay that much less in income tax. Even people in need of actual charity don't lose per se, since it's not like they stood to benefit in the first place.
If Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie really wanted to donate $1 million to the starving children of Haiti, they could just bring it there themselves, in however many of those black, heavy duty Hefty bags that would necessitate. Or they could just drop those bags from an airplane, in a flyover, to reduce the risk of being eaten alive. If they centered the plane directly over one of those filthy, cholera-soaked camps where Sean Penn works (as seen in the first episode of the most recent season of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations), I can't imagine there would be an issue with the elite, relatively light skinted Haitians somehow getting their hands on the money.


Or better yet, they could just give the money to Sean Penn to deliver. He probably lives near them out in Hollywood when he's not off somewhere doing charity work, and apparently the people of Haiti know better than to fuck with him. I remember reading in Rolling Stone that he walks around with a gun on his waist at all times, in case he needs to pop a cap in a Haitian's ass. And I'm thinking he's probably one of the few people down there packing steel. Not unlike Columbus when he first landed in, wouldn't you know, Haiti. What would be the point of having a gun in Haiti, when you don't even have food, or a clean place to take a shit? Anyone you could shoot will probably be dead soon anyway. And you could probably eat for a year in Haiti for what you could get for even a shitty gun.
I'm actually more concerned with the fact that Wyclef Jean still stole what sounds like pretty much all of the $16 million his Yele Haiti organization collected mostly via Black People Twitter in the days and weeks following the earthquake in Haiti going on two years ago. Even after he realized people were onto him. There was that post I rattled off, pretty much as soon as I saw Text Yele to 50501 or whatever (don't actually text that) trending alongside #uainthittingitright, hours still before it was all trendy. Then of course the liberal Jew-run media had to hop on it, in part because it was an opportunity to throw a prominent black man under a bus. (Note the slight but important difference in our respective motives.)
It eventually got to the point where Wyclef's publicist suggested he give a press conference in which he tearfully defended his organization, admitting to having made mistakes in the past (the whole "being a fake charity" thing), but denied the actual wrongdoing that was right there in the documents the Smoking Gun turned up, via jedi mind tricks. In retrospect, this is the point when he should have just turned over all that money Yele Haiti took in to an actual charity and cut his losses.
The New York Post went through Yele Haiti's tax filings for 2K10 and found that it only spent $5.1 million of that $16 million. So, according to my math, that's $10.9 million out the window. I'm not sure if administrative costs are included in that $5.1 million. But let's say they aren't, and let's say Yele Haiti costs $5 million/year to run. These BS charities are notorious for costing a lot of money to run.
And I don't mind being generous in this case. Anyone involved with the making of The Score should only use the finest of ink pens. That's still $5.9 million that just up and disappeared - over a third of the overall amount donated. #math And it's not like that $5.1 million necessarily went to a good cause just because we actually know where it went. The Post, which is willing to go to certain lengths to make black people look like thieves, looked into a couple of the companies that received contracts to deliver clean water and what have you to Haiti in the wake of the quake, and wouldn't you know one of them is owned by 'Clef's brother in law, who I'm assuming (because I'm racist against my own people) isn't an expert in disaster relief, and another one doesn't even appear to be an actual company. It looks like the guy who's said to own it, or the guy who got some of that $16 million anyway, didn't even bother filing the documents necessary to make it at least look semi-legit on paper. But he did find time to buy three properties in Florida that year, including a luxury waterfront condo.
But I'm sure that's just a coincidence. Just because he's not literate enough to fill out a few forms at Legal Zoom doesn't necessarily mean he didn't already have enough money to cop three cribs in one year. It could be that he still plans to donate the money he received from Yele Haiti to earthquake victims in, ahem, Haiti, or he already has, and we just don't know about it. I'm holding out hope that Wyclef's charity really is on the up and up, not because I can't handle thinking that Wyclef Jean is an evil thief, but because the idea that Wyclef Jean would still go through with something like that when there was no way he could possibly get away with it is embarrassing to me as a black person.

1 comment:

  1. Yes, Wyclef only spent 5.1 million on disaster relief, by his organization also spent on non-disaster relief programs including employment, education and agricultural development. Wyclef himself divulged in his 2010 tax report that the construction company used by his charity belonged to his brother in law. Yele's former president of operation give a detailed account on how the money was spent:
    http://www.showbiz411.com/2011/11/28/exclusive-yele-haiti-former-chief-responds-to-ny-post-breaks-out-numbers

    The deals made by Yele may appear fishy on paper but they get the job done at a cheaperrate. Yele is a relatively small NGO, yet manages to do things larger, better funded NGOs can't. Miami Herald interviewed the man who's company was reported by the nypost as non-existent:
    http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/11/28/2522575/wyclef-jean-yele-misspending-allegations.html#disqus_thread

    ReplyDelete