Vague recollection of a controversial head of state’s Manhattan house visit and 2002 Monterey TED conference plane trip

It’s an absurdly vast house, among the largest in Manhattan, but the dining room is windowless, creating a hermetic or stop-time sense, broken only by the household staff ferrying in time-of-day-appropriate foods and beverages. The real world seems terribly far away, but with paparazzi often posted near by, it’s dangerously close too. Once I arrived for a visit and found several police cars blocking the street and thought the worst—they’d come for him again. But it was a security detail for a controversial head of state who had come for tea. We met several years before he became arguably the world’s most notorious sex offender. In 2002, his plane, a meticulously appointed 737, ferried a group of people to the TED conference in Monterey. He was the mysterious and peculiarly gracious host arriving after everyone had boarded: tanned, relaxed, attentive, soliciting every guest’s story and views, and accompanied by three young women not his daughters, witty, poised, helpful, and beautiful—out of a men’s magazine fantasy of the luxe life. One more thing about this trip suggesting something of his unique view of the public world and what you got to see when you are near him. Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with their company rising into the stratosphere, came out to see his plane on the Monterey tarmac and, with a few other Googlers, literally ran whooping from one end of the plane to the other. Then, sitting in the plane’s plush HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024229