New York is a paradise for criminals

New York, New York, once a wonderful town/ The people are crap and the mayor’s a clown/ The only safe space is a hole in the ground… I could go on, but why be so negative? Arriving from bucolic Switzerland, Newark, one of America’s ‘murder capitals’, feels like Katanga circa 1960. If this isn’t a third-world airport, then I don’t know what is. My driver tells me I’m lucky that the virus is keeping people away otherwise it would take at least three hours just to get through customs. None of the electric signs that would tell us which terminal to collect our luggage from is working, so some very old people have to hike a mile or two to search for them. The airport itself looks grubby, shabby and worn.

I’m in a so-so mood, however, as I was the only sucker in first class and drank two bottles of good Swiss red, which helped me relax. The Airbus was one third full — if that. But the wily Swiss were going full out trying to save on fuel, and although they denied it, the trip from Zurich took nine-plus hours. The alternative is to fly private, which costs 300,000 smackers.

When the Dominican strongman Rafael Trujillo was assassinated back in the early 1960s, my friend and mentor Porfirio Rubirosa chartered a Boeing 707 to fly the dictator’s two sons and himself to Ciudad Trujillo, as the capital was then known. (I liked the idea that Trujillo had called the capital after himself. Just before he was ambushed, the old boy had had a quickie with his young Pepita, but he nevertheless emerged mortally wounded from his car and shot one of his assassins.