#white people marrying into native families and killing them and inheriting their money and about leonardo dicaprio's character poising his

[maddy-ferguson]

something from the book i so wish had been in the tbosas movie is the way snow thinks lucy gray is below him...and the fact that he never grows out of it (which doesn't mean he doesn't like her, he just also kind of despises her and people like her). when i reread the book i had just seen killers of the flower moon and snow and lucy gray's relationship was very reminiscent of ernest and mollie's relationship for me like when king hale asks ernest "can you stand [mollie's] kind?" even though their kind were doing unspeakable things to her kind? snow and lucy gray's relationship is very much like that to me and there's also the power he has over her by literally being responsible for her life and idk i feel like if you only watch the movie you can delude yourself into thinking he's somewhat overcome his prejudice against people from the districts by falling in love with a girl who isn't from the capitol when he never does he thinks they're savages from day 1 to day like 60 and he thinks it on day 55 too

#it's like this racial thing kind of which is why it really reminded me of killers of the flower moon because yeah that's a movie about #white people marrying into native families and killing them and inheriting their money and about leonardo dicaprio's character poising his #wife to do that and blowing up her sister's house. etc #and so i don't care about people being like oh snow's hot because like that's the face of an actor of course people would think that lol #but the takes i see about him and lucy gray's relationship i'm like. huh. #also the possessiveness. i could actually go on for quite a while about the changes in their dynamic that makes it not hit like it did in #the book or like he's still kinda possessive i guess but it's a little aw her ex-boyfriend is the reason why she was a tribute of course he #doesn't like him. when like. he legit thinks of her as belonging to him. in many ways #also the one change that i think shows that their relationship is portrayed differently in significant ways in the movie is the fact that #when he wakes up in the hospital he immediately tells tigris and sejanus that lucy gray saved him when in the book he was literally like NO #ONE CAN EVER KNOW #i was like oh! #and when you change that it's kind of like. what's the point then #there's also something to be said about how he says she's not really from 12 and about how it's unfair she had to live there at all. and #her not really being from 12 is something she says herself but! #also while i was reading the book i was totally reminded of the quote from that guy who made the last of us about how #intense hate is universal and about vengeance #like literally okay coriolanus snow #and like i say: brf slt

[newstfionline]

Behind the Bar, Mixing Drinks With Aid for a Faraway Home

By Elizabeth Williamson, NY Times, July 9, 2018

Sambonn Lek, bartender at the St. Regis hotel near the White House, has shaken and stirred for movers and shakers since the Carter administration. At 66, he leads a disappearing fraternity: barkeeps who know their regulars’ names and favorite cocktails, and when they drink so much of the latter that they forget the former, find them a ride home.

When it’s quiet, he breaks out his repertoire of magic tricks, which in the days before the fire marshal stepped in included “breathing fire” by blowing a mouthful of spirits past a flame.

Mr. Lek’s greatest act, though, is performed daily in his native Cambodia, with the help of his affluent patrons. He is a Vietnam-era refugee turned philanthropist, collecting spare change and big checks from customers to fund Sam Relief, which builds schools, digs wells, and provides food, clothing and medical and school supplies in his native Cambodia. Since 2000 his nonprofit has built 27 schools, dug nearly 400 wells, delivered 290 tons of rice and awarded 120 scholarships to Cambodian schoolchildren.

Mr. Lek, who said he escaped Cambodia’s genocide and poverty because America opened its doors to him, believes that human generosity transcends politics. Over two decades, his patrons of both parties have proved him right.

“Sam is one of these rare people who found his calling in life, and it shows,” said Kevin Moore, owner of Moore Communications & Associates, in Danbury, Conn., who met Mr. Lek two decades ago and has donated to Sam Relief most years since.

Mr. Lek has long been a local personality, his various career moves tracked by the restaurant industry and the local news media. And while a showman behind the bar, Mr. Lek smiles and grows quiet when asked about the emotions underpinning his effort. “That I came here was so lucky,” he said.

He arrived in the United States as an English-language student in 1974, barely a year after the American bombing of Cambodia. A year later Cambodia fell to the communist Khmer Rouge. Its leader, Pol Pot, set on creating an agrarian utopia, wiped out the nation’s intellectuals and middle class and killed around two million people.

Mr. Lek’s father, a diplomat, and his mother, who were both living abroad, received asylum in France the following year. The United States offered refugee status to Cambodians studying here during the overthrow, and Mr. Lek was among the lucky ones. He studied at the University of the District of Columbia, then Montgomery College until, in need of money, he left his studies before earning a degree.

He recalls the exact date, April 7, 1976, that he landed a bartending job in the Town & Country Lounge, in the landmark Mayflower Hotel a few blocks from the White House. Soon afterward, he married Nara Sok, a fellow refugee he had met at a friend’s wedding. The couple has two children: Bonnary, 38, whose name means “lucky woman,” and Benjamin, 36. Mr. Lek became an American citizen in 1980.

A clubby, wood-paneled establishment that opened in 1948, the Town & Country had a storied past and a long list of influential imbibers, including former Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland and Eliot Spitzer, a former New York governor who drank there before meeting prostitutes in the Mayflower’s Room 871.

What Mr. Lek noticed most, though, was “the food people threw away,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh God, people could eat this.’”

Mr. Lek’s mixology and magic tricks drew regulars who became friends. In 1998, Mr. Lek’s mother died, leaving him $2,500. In keeping with his Buddhist faith, he used the money to buy “rice for the poor people who don’t have food, and clothing for children to attend school.” He told a few patrons, who contributed, too, and Sam Relief was born.

In its early days, “Sam would take the money there on his summer vacation, go into the villages and buy rice himself to make sure it got delivered,” said James Meyers, a bassist in a jazz band called The Loungers, who has known Mr. Lek since the 1970s. Mayflower patrons sometimes tagged along, helping deliver.

Mr. Lek kept binders behind the bar with lists of donors and photographs of the works they had funded. William Batdorf, a patron and accountant now deceased, drew up paperwork to “make me 501(c)3 legal,” Mr. Lek said.

Sam Relief’s website says it costs $55,000 to build a five-room school, and $250 to dig a well. A donation of $2,500 buys school supplies for 500 students for a year, $350 buys a ton of rice, and $25 pays a teacher’s salary for a month. Mr. Lek is apolitical, and his donors come from across the political spectrum.

Philip Hoffman, a former Republican Michigan state senator who owned a lobbying firm, met Mr. Lek on a trip to Washington around 2001. “We developed a friendship right after Sam set up the relief fund, and I’d donate to it,” Mr. Hoffman said in an interview. “For wedding gifts, we would give a couple a ton of rice,” donated to Cambodian families in their names, he said.

“Sam’s exuberance was what really convinced me to get involved. He didn’t have any government foundation backing him up, there was nothing off the top for Sam, it was 100 percent for his people,” Mr. Hoffman said. The Hoffmans later funded another school, named Pax Christi. “My only regret is that I didn’t do 20 schools,” Mr. Hoffman said.

Andi Drimmer, a computer programmer from Gaithersburg, Md., has never met Sam but read about him in The Washington Post in 2013, shortly after she inherited money from her mother, just as he did. She has paid for 16 wells so far.

In 2011, the Town & Country closed, giving way to trendier pubs. Mr. Lek worked in the Mayflower’s new bar, but it wasn’t the same, and in late 2013 he and Nara decided to return to Cambodia, continue their charity work and relax.

But their children missed them, and “some of my guests were emailing, ‘Come back,’” Mr. Lek said. He and Nara realized “America is our home,” he said, adding, “My heart and spirit were here.”

Through friends, he learned that Marriott, which owns the Mayflower, was looking for a bartender for its St. Regis hotel bar. Mr. Lek got the job a week later. “Good karma came back to me,” he said.

Mr. Lek returned last winter after four years away, to a Trump-era Washington. The city is more expensive than ever, and asylum seekers, some of his patrons said, don’t seem to garner the same sympathy as when he arrived, a skinny student who escaped the killing fields and built an American family. But his friends hadn’t forgotten him.

The St. Regis held a party in the bar to welcome him back. Among those present was Mr. Meyers, the bassist. Mr. Lek attended his wedding, and knows his family. In 1981, Mr. Meyers’s brother, John, was walking down a street in Miami when a gunfight erupted nearby. He was killed by a stray bullet.

Neither of the Meyers brothers had ever been to Cambodia, but today a village well there bears John Meyers’s name. “Sam showed me a picture,” Mr. Meyers said.

Washington is known more for power politics than humanitarian works. What inspired these people to fork over thousands of dollars to a bartender with a story? Mr. Moore had an answer.

“Despite what might be interpreted as a meanness in today’s world, there’s an impulse to help. We all are our brother’s keepers,” he said. “People like Sam remind us of that.”

#Cambodia #Sambonn Lek #Sam Relief #bartender with aid program

[dani-qrt]

Behind the Bar, Mixing Drinks With Aid for a Faraway Home

Sambonn Lek, bartender at the St. Regis hotel near the White House, has shaken and stirred for movers and shakers since the Carter administration. At 66, he leads a disappearing fraternity: barkeeps who know their regulars’ names and favorite cocktails, and when they drink so much of the latter that they forget the former, find them a ride home.

When it’s quiet, he breaks out his repertoire of magic tricks, which in the days before the fire marshal stepped in included “breathing fire” by blowing a mouthful of spirits past a flame.

Mr. Lek’s greatest act, though, is performed daily in his native Cambodia, with the help of his affluent patrons. He is a Vietnam-era refugee turned philanthropist, collecting spare change and big checks from customers to fund Sam Relief, which builds schools, digs wells, and provides food, clothing and medical and school supplies in his native Cambodia. Since 2000 his nonprofit has built 27 schools, dug nearly 400 wells, delivered 290 tons of rice and awarded 120 scholarships to Cambodian schoolchildren.

Mr. Lek, who said he escaped Cambodia’s genocide and poverty because America opened its doors to him, believes that human generosity transcends politics. Over two decades, his patrons of both parties have proved him right.

“Sam is one of these rare people who found his calling in life, and it shows,” said Kevin Moore, owner of Moore Communications & Associates, in Danbury, Conn., who met Mr. Lek two decades ago and has donated to Sam Relief most years since.

Mr. Lek has long been a local personality, his various career moves tracked by the restaurant industry and the local news media. And while a showman behind the bar, Mr. Lek smiles and grows quiet when asked about the emotions underpinning his effort. “That I came here was so lucky,” he said.

He arrived in the United States as an English-language student in 1974, barely a year after the American bombing of Cambodia. A year later Cambodia fell to the communist Khmer Rouge. Its leader, Pol Pot, set on creating an agrarian utopia, wiped out the nation’s intellectuals and middle class and killed around two million people.

Mr. Lek’s father, a diplomat, and his mother, who were both living abroad, received asylum in France the following year. The United States offered refugee status to Cambodians studying here during the overthrow, and Mr. Lek was among the lucky ones. He studied at the University of the District of Columbia, then Montgomery College until, in need of money, he left his studies before earning a degree.

He recalls the exact date, April 7, 1976, that he landed a bartending job in the Town & Country Lounge, in the landmark Mayflower Hotel a few blocks from the White House. Soon afterward, he married Nara Sok, a fellow refugee he had met at a friend’s wedding. The couple has two children: Bonnary, 38, whose name means “lucky woman,” and Benjamin, 36. Mr. Lek became an American citizen in 1980.

A clubby, wood-paneled establishment that opened in 1948, the Town & Country had a storied past and a long list of influential imbibers, including former Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland and Eliot Spitzer, a former New York governor who drank there before meeting prostitutes in the Mayflower’s Room 871.

What Mr. Lek noticed most, though, was “the food people threw away,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh God, people could eat this.’”

Mr. Lek’s mixology and magic tricks drew regulars who became friends. In 1998, Mr. Lek’s mother died, leaving him $2,500. In keeping with his Buddhist faith, he used the money to buy “rice for the poor people who don’t have food, and clothing for children to attend school.” He told a few patrons, who contributed, too, and Sam Relief was born.

In its early days, “Sam would take the money there on his summer vacation, go into the villages and buy rice himself to make sure it got delivered,” said James Meyers, a bassist in a jazz band called The Loungers, who has known Mr. Lek since the 1970s. Mayflower patrons sometimes tagged along, helping deliver.

Mr. Lek kept binders behind the bar with lists of donors and photographs of the works they had funded. William Batdorf, a patron and accountant now deceased, drew up paperwork to “make me 501(c)3 legal,” Mr. Lek said.

Sam Relief’s website says it costs $55,000 to build a five-room school, and $250 to dig a well. A donation of $2,500 buys school supplies for 500 students for a year, $350 buys a ton of rice, and $25 pays a teacher’s salary for a month. Mr. Lek is apolitical, and his donors come from across the political spectrum.

Philip Hoffman, a former Republican Michigan state senator who owned a lobbying firm, met Mr. Lek on a trip to Washington around 2001. “We developed a friendship right after Sam set up the relief fund, and I’d donate to it,” Mr. Hoffman said in an interview. “For wedding gifts, we would give a couple a ton of rice,” donated to Cambodian families in their names, he said.

In 2006, Mr. Lek asked the Hoffmans to fund a school. “We prayed on it and thought, ‘If we didn’t do it, who would?’” Mr. Hoffman recalled. The school was named Lumen Christi, after Mr. Hoffman’s high school in Jackson, Mich. Sam Relief built six schools that year.

“Sam’s exuberance was what really convinced me to get involved. He didn’t have any government foundation backing him up, there was nothing off the top for Sam, it was 100 percent for his people,” Mr. Hoffman said. The Hoffmans later funded another school, named Pax Christi. “My only regret is that I didn’t do 20 schools,” Mr. Hoffman said.

Andi Drimmer, a computer programmer from Gaithersburg, Md., has never met Sam but read about him in The Washington Post in 2013, shortly after she inherited money from her mother, just as he did. She has paid for 16 wells so far.

In 2011, the Town & Country closed, giving way to trendier pubs. Mr. Lek worked in the Mayflower’s new bar, but it wasn’t the same, and in late 2013 he and Nara decided to return to Cambodia, continue their charity work and relax.

But their children missed them, and “some of my guests were emailing, ‘Come back,’” Mr. Lek said. He and Nara realized “America is our home,” he said, adding, “My heart and spirit were here.”

Through friends, he learned that Marriott, which owns the Mayflower, was looking for a bartender for its St. Regis hotel bar. Mr. Lek got the job a week later. “Good karma came back to me,” he said.

Mr. Lek returned last winter after four years away, to a Trump-era Washington. The city is more expensive than ever, and asylum seekers, some of his patrons said, don’t seem to garner the same sympathy as when he arrived, a skinny student who escaped the killing fields and built an American family. But his friends hadn’t forgotten him.

The St. Regis held a party in the bar to welcome him back. Among those present was Mr. Meyers, the bassist. Mr. Lek attended his wedding, and knows his family. In 1981, Mr. Meyers’s brother, John, was walking down a street in Miami when a gunfight erupted nearby. He was killed by a stray bullet.

Neither of the Meyers brothers had ever been to Cambodia, but today a village well there bears John Meyers’s name. “Sam showed me a picture,” Mr. Meyers said.

Washington is known more for power politics than humanitarian works. What inspired these people to fork over thousands of dollars to a bartender with a story? Mr. Moore had an answer.

“Despite what might be interpreted as a meanness in today’s world, there’s an impulse to help. We all are our brother’s keepers,” he said. “People like Sam remind us of that.”

The post Behind the Bar, Mixing Drinks With Aid for a Faraway Home appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2NAX2Qs via Online News

#World News #Today News #Daily News #Breaking News #News Headline #Entertainment News #Sports news #Sci-Tech

[dragnews]

Behind the Bar, Mixing Drinks With Aid for a Faraway Home

Sambonn Lek, bartender at the St. Regis hotel near the White House, has shaken and stirred for movers and shakers since the Carter administration. At 66, he leads a disappearing fraternity: barkeeps who know their regulars’ names and favorite cocktails, and when they drink so much of the latter that they forget the former, find them a ride home.

When it’s quiet, he breaks out his repertoire of magic tricks, which in the days before the fire marshal stepped in included “breathing fire” by blowing a mouthful of spirits past a flame.

Mr. Lek’s greatest act, though, is performed daily in his native Cambodia, with the help of his affluent patrons. He is a Vietnam-era refugee turned philanthropist, collecting spare change and big checks from customers to fund Sam Relief, which builds schools, digs wells, and provides food, clothing and medical and school supplies in his native Cambodia. Since 2000 his nonprofit has built 27 schools, dug nearly 400 wells, delivered 290 tons of rice and awarded 120 scholarships to Cambodian schoolchildren.

Mr. Lek, who said he escaped Cambodia’s genocide and poverty because America opened its doors to him, believes that human generosity transcends politics. Over two decades, his patrons of both parties have proved him right.

“Sam is one of these rare people who found his calling in life, and it shows,” said Kevin Moore, owner of Moore Communications & Associates, in Danbury, Conn., who met Mr. Lek two decades ago and has donated to Sam Relief most years since.

Mr. Lek has long been a local personality, his various career moves tracked by the restaurant industry and the local news media. And while a showman behind the bar, Mr. Lek smiles and grows quiet when asked about the emotions underpinning his effort. “That I came here was so lucky,” he said.

He arrived in the United States as an English-language student in 1974, barely a year after the American bombing of Cambodia. A year later Cambodia fell to the communist Khmer Rouge. Its leader, Pol Pot, set on creating an agrarian utopia, wiped out the nation’s intellectuals and middle class and killed around two million people.

Mr. Lek’s father, a diplomat, and his mother, who were both living abroad, received asylum in France the following year. The United States offered refugee status to Cambodians studying here during the overthrow, and Mr. Lek was among the lucky ones. He studied at the University of the District of Columbia, then Montgomery College until, in need of money, he left his studies before earning a degree.

He recalls the exact date, April 7, 1976, that he landed a bartending job in the Town & Country Lounge, in the landmark Mayflower Hotel a few blocks from the White House. Soon afterward, he married Nara Sok, a fellow refugee he had met at a friend’s wedding. The couple has two children: Bonnary, 38, whose name means “lucky woman,” and Benjamin, 36. Mr. Lek became an American citizen in 1980.

A clubby, wood-paneled establishment that opened in 1948, the Town & Country had a storied past and a long list of influential imbibers, including former Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland and Eliot Spitzer, a former New York governor who drank there before meeting prostitutes in the Mayflower’s Room 871.

What Mr. Lek noticed most, though, was “the food people threw away,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh God, people could eat this.’”

Mr. Lek’s mixology and magic tricks drew regulars who became friends. In 1998, Mr. Lek’s mother died, leaving him $2,500. In keeping with his Buddhist faith, he used the money to buy “rice for the poor people who don’t have food, and clothing for children to attend school.” He told a few patrons, who contributed, too, and Sam Relief was born.

In its early days, “Sam would take the money there on his summer vacation, go into the villages and buy rice himself to make sure it got delivered,” said James Meyers, a bassist in a jazz band called The Loungers, who has known Mr. Lek since the 1970s. Mayflower patrons sometimes tagged along, helping deliver.

Mr. Lek kept binders behind the bar with lists of donors and photographs of the works they had funded. William Batdorf, a patron and accountant now deceased, drew up paperwork to “make me 501(c)3 legal,” Mr. Lek said.

Sam Relief’s website says it costs $55,000 to build a five-room school, and $250 to dig a well. A donation of $2,500 buys school supplies for 500 students for a year, $350 buys a ton of rice, and $25 pays a teacher’s salary for a month. Mr. Lek is apolitical, and his donors come from across the political spectrum.

Philip Hoffman, a former Republican Michigan state senator who owned a lobbying firm, met Mr. Lek on a trip to Washington around 2001. “We developed a friendship right after Sam set up the relief fund, and I’d donate to it,” Mr. Hoffman said in an interview. “For wedding gifts, we would give a couple a ton of rice,” donated to Cambodian families in their names, he said.

In 2006, Mr. Lek asked the Hoffmans to fund a school. “We prayed on it and thought, ‘If we didn’t do it, who would?’” Mr. Hoffman recalled. The school was named Lumen Christi, after Mr. Hoffman’s high school in Jackson, Mich. Sam Relief built six schools that year.

“Sam’s exuberance was what really convinced me to get involved. He didn’t have any government foundation backing him up, there was nothing off the top for Sam, it was 100 percent for his people,” Mr. Hoffman said. The Hoffmans later funded another school, named Pax Christi. “My only regret is that I didn’t do 20 schools,” Mr. Hoffman said.

Andi Drimmer, a computer programmer from Gaithersburg, Md., has never met Sam but read about him in The Washington Post in 2013, shortly after she inherited money from her mother, just as he did. She has paid for 16 wells so far.

In 2011, the Town & Country closed, giving way to trendier pubs. Mr. Lek worked in the Mayflower’s new bar, but it wasn’t the same, and in late 2013 he and Nara decided to return to Cambodia, continue their charity work and relax.

But their children missed them, and “some of my guests were emailing, ‘Come back,’” Mr. Lek said. He and Nara realized “America is our home,” he said, adding, “My heart and spirit were here.”

Through friends, he learned that Marriott, which owns the Mayflower, was looking for a bartender for its St. Regis hotel bar. Mr. Lek got the job a week later. “Good karma came back to me,” he said.

Mr. Lek returned last winter after four years away, to a Trump-era Washington. The city is more expensive than ever, and asylum seekers, some of his patrons said, don’t seem to garner the same sympathy as when he arrived, a skinny student who escaped the killing fields and built an American family. But his friends hadn’t forgotten him.

The St. Regis held a party in the bar to welcome him back. Among those present was Mr. Meyers, the bassist. Mr. Lek attended his wedding, and knows his family. In 1981, Mr. Meyers’s brother, John, was walking down a street in Miami when a gunfight erupted nearby. He was killed by a stray bullet.

Neither of the Meyers brothers had ever been to Cambodia, but today a village well there bears John Meyers’s name. “Sam showed me a picture,” Mr. Meyers said.

Washington is known more for power politics than humanitarian works. What inspired these people to fork over thousands of dollars to a bartender with a story? Mr. Moore had an answer.

“Despite what might be interpreted as a meanness in today’s world, there’s an impulse to help. We all are our brother’s keepers,” he said. “People like Sam remind us of that.”

The post Behind the Bar, Mixing Drinks With Aid for a Faraway Home appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2NAX2Qs via Today News

#Daily News #Daily World News #Daily Business News #Daily Sports News #World The News

[party-hard-or-die]

Behind the Bar, Mixing Drinks With Aid for a Faraway Home

Sambonn Lek, bartender at the St. Regis hotel near the White House, has shaken and stirred for movers and shakers since the Carter administration. At 66, he leads a disappearing fraternity: barkeeps who know their regulars’ names and favorite cocktails, and when they drink so much of the latter that they forget the former, find them a ride home.

When it’s quiet, he breaks out his repertoire of magic tricks, which in the days before the fire marshal stepped in included “breathing fire” by blowing a mouthful of spirits past a flame.

Mr. Lek’s greatest act, though, is performed daily in his native Cambodia, with the help of his affluent patrons. He is a Vietnam-era refugee turned philanthropist, collecting spare change and big checks from customers to fund Sam Relief, which builds schools, digs wells, and provides food, clothing and medical and school supplies in his native Cambodia. Since 2000 his nonprofit has built 27 schools, dug nearly 400 wells, delivered 290 tons of rice and awarded 120 scholarships to Cambodian schoolchildren.

Mr. Lek, who said he escaped Cambodia’s genocide and poverty because America opened its doors to him, believes that human generosity transcends politics. Over two decades, his patrons of both parties have proved him right.

“Sam is one of these rare people who found his calling in life, and it shows,” said Kevin Moore, owner of Moore Communications & Associates, in Danbury, Conn., who met Mr. Lek two decades ago and has donated to Sam Relief most years since.

Mr. Lek has long been a local personality, his various career moves tracked by the restaurant industry and the local news media. And while a showman behind the bar, Mr. Lek smiles and grows quiet when asked about the emotions underpinning his effort. “That I came here was so lucky,” he said.

He arrived in the United States as an English-language student in 1974, barely a year after the American bombing of Cambodia. A year later Cambodia fell to the communist Khmer Rouge. Its leader, Pol Pot, set on creating an agrarian utopia, wiped out the nation’s intellectuals and middle class and killed around two million people.

Mr. Lek’s father, a diplomat, and his mother, who were both living abroad, received asylum in France the following year. The United States offered refugee status to Cambodians studying here during the overthrow, and Mr. Lek was among the lucky ones. He studied at the University of the District of Columbia, then Montgomery College until, in need of money, he left his studies before earning a degree.

He recalls the exact date, April 7, 1976, that he landed a bartending job in the Town & Country Lounge, in the landmark Mayflower Hotel a few blocks from the White House. Soon afterward, he married Nara Sok, a fellow refugee he had met at a friend’s wedding. The couple has two children: Bonnary, 38, whose name means “lucky woman,” and Benjamin, 36. Mr. Lek became an American citizen in 1980.

A clubby, wood-paneled establishment that opened in 1948, the Town & Country had a storied past and a long list of influential imbibers, including former Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland and Eliot Spitzer, a former New York governor who drank there before meeting prostitutes in the Mayflower’s Room 871.

What Mr. Lek noticed most, though, was “the food people threw away,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh God, people could eat this.’”

Mr. Lek’s mixology and magic tricks drew regulars who became friends. In 1998, Mr. Lek’s mother died, leaving him $2,500. In keeping with his Buddhist faith, he used the money to buy “rice for the poor people who don’t have food, and clothing for children to attend school.” He told a few patrons, who contributed, too, and Sam Relief was born.

In its early days, “Sam would take the money there on his summer vacation, go into the villages and buy rice himself to make sure it got delivered,” said James Meyers, a bassist in a jazz band called The Loungers, who has known Mr. Lek since the 1970s. Mayflower patrons sometimes tagged along, helping deliver.

Mr. Lek kept binders behind the bar with lists of donors and photographs of the works they had funded. William Batdorf, a patron and accountant now deceased, drew up paperwork to “make me 501(c)3 legal,” Mr. Lek said.

Sam Relief’s website says it costs $55,000 to build a five-room school, and $250 to dig a well. A donation of $2,500 buys school supplies for 500 students for a year, $350 buys a ton of rice, and $25 pays a teacher’s salary for a month. Mr. Lek is apolitical, and his donors come from across the political spectrum.

Philip Hoffman, a former Republican Michigan state senator who owned a lobbying firm, met Mr. Lek on a trip to Washington around 2001. “We developed a friendship right after Sam set up the relief fund, and I’d donate to it,” Mr. Hoffman said in an interview. “For wedding gifts, we would give a couple a ton of rice,” donated to Cambodian families in their names, he said.

In 2006, Mr. Lek asked the Hoffmans to fund a school. “We prayed on it and thought, ‘If we didn’t do it, who would?’” Mr. Hoffman recalled. The school was named Lumen Christi, after Mr. Hoffman’s high school in Jackson, Mich. Sam Relief built six schools that year.

“Sam’s exuberance was what really convinced me to get involved. He didn’t have any government foundation backing him up, there was nothing off the top for Sam, it was 100 percent for his people,” Mr. Hoffman said. The Hoffmans later funded another school, named Pax Christi. “My only regret is that I didn’t do 20 schools,” Mr. Hoffman said.

Andi Drimmer, a computer programmer from Gaithersburg, Md., has never met Sam but read about him in The Washington Post in 2013, shortly after she inherited money from her mother, just as he did. She has paid for 16 wells so far.

In 2011, the Town & Country closed, giving way to trendier pubs. Mr. Lek worked in the Mayflower’s new bar, but it wasn’t the same, and in late 2013 he and Nara decided to return to Cambodia, continue their charity work and relax.

But their children missed them, and “some of my guests were emailing, ‘Come back,’” Mr. Lek said. He and Nara realized “America is our home,” he said, adding, “My heart and spirit were here.”

Through friends, he learned that Marriott, which owns the Mayflower, was looking for a bartender for its St. Regis hotel bar. Mr. Lek got the job a week later. “Good karma came back to me,” he said.

Mr. Lek returned last winter after four years away, to a Trump-era Washington. The city is more expensive than ever, and asylum seekers, some of his patrons said, don’t seem to garner the same sympathy as when he arrived, a skinny student who escaped the killing fields and built an American family. But his friends hadn’t forgotten him.

The St. Regis held a party in the bar to welcome him back. Among those present was Mr. Meyers, the bassist. Mr. Lek attended his wedding, and knows his family. In 1981, Mr. Meyers’s brother, John, was walking down a street in Miami when a gunfight erupted nearby. He was killed by a stray bullet.

Neither of the Meyers brothers had ever been to Cambodia, but today a village well there bears John Meyers’s name. “Sam showed me a picture,” Mr. Meyers said.

Washington is known more for power politics than humanitarian works. What inspired these people to fork over thousands of dollars to a bartender with a story? Mr. Moore had an answer.

“Despite what might be interpreted as a meanness in today’s world, there’s an impulse to help. We all are our brother’s keepers,” he said. “People like Sam remind us of that.”

The post Behind the Bar, Mixing Drinks With Aid for a Faraway Home appeared first on World The News.

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In The 1920s, A Community Conspired To Kill Native Americans For Their Oil Money Morning Edition (NPR, 4/17/17) +MP3

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Generations ago, the Osage Indian Nation was forced to move. Not for the first time, white settlers pushed them off their land in the 1800s. The writer David Grann sees in that move the start of an astonishing and tragic story.

DAVID GRANN: When they were being driven off their land in Kansas, they didn't know where to go. And an Osage chief stood up and he said, we should go to this area that would later become northeast Oklahoma because it's rocky and infertile and the white man will finally leave us alone.

INSKEEP: It turned out the Osage had chosen land that was rich in oil. In the early 20th century, members of this beaten-down Indian nation grew spectacularly wealthy. They bought cars. They built mansions. They made so much oil money that the government began appointing white guardians to help the Indians spend it. And then the Osage started to be killed.

David Grann investigated their story for the new book "Killers Of The Flower Moon." He tells this half-forgotten story beginning with Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman, in 1921.

What happened to her?

GRANN: So Mollie Burkhart's family - she had four sisters. And one day in 1921, her older sister disappeared. And about a week later, her body was found in a ravine. Mollie's mother, within two months, she, too, had died. And evidence later suggested that she had been secretly poisoned.

Not long after that, Mollie was sleeping in her bed. She heard a loud explosion. And she had another sister who lived not far away. And in the area where her sister's house was, she could see almost this orange fireball rising into the sky. And her sister's house had been blown up, killing that sister as well as her sister's husband and a servant.

INSKEEP: It's still a little hard to get your brain around how it is that someone could commit all these killings and then inherit their oil wealth. Who would be in a position to do that?

GRANN: What makes these crimes so sinister is that it involved marrying into families. It involved a level of calculation and a level of betraying the very people you pretended to love.

INSKEEP: You mentioned Mollie Burkhart.

GRANN: That's exactly what happened to Mollie. She had married a white man. And his uncle was the most powerful settler in the area. He was known as the King of the Osage Hills. And he had orchestrated a very sinister plot played out over years where he directed his nephew, who had married Mollie Burkhart, to marry her so that he could then begin to kill the family members one by one and siphon off all the wealth.

INSKEEP: How was this series of crimes investigated?

GRANN: So it's really important to understand back then that there was so much lawlessness. That was one of the things that shocked me when I began researching the story that even in the 1920s, much of America remained a country that was not fully rooted in its laws. Its legal institutions were very fragile.

Mollie Burkhart beseeched the authorities to try to investigate, to get help. But because of prejudice, they often ignored the crimes. And almost anyone who tried to investigate the killings, they, too, were killed.

One attorney tried to gather evidence. And one day, he was thrown off a speeding train, and all the evidence that he had gathered had disappeared. Another time, an oil man had traveled to Washington, D.C., to try to get help. He was then found stabbed more than 20 times. And finally a very - then very obscure branch of the Justice Department intervened. It was known as the Bureau of Investigation. And it was what would later be renamed the FBI.

INSKEEP: J. Edgar Hoover.

GRANN: J. Edgar Hoover. He was the new director. And it became one of the FBI's first major homicide cases that it ever dealt with.

INSKEEP: Did the agency that became the FBI solve these murders?

GRANN: The Bureau initially badly bungled the case. And J. Edgar Hoover was new in the job. And he was very insecure. He had dreams about building a bureaucratic empire. And he turned the case over to a frontier lawman, who put together an undercover team that included one of - probably the only American-Indian agent in the Bureau at the time. They were able, through some dogged investigation, to eventually capture some of the ringleaders.

INSKEEP: Are you telling me that the future Federal Bureau of Investigation established its reputation as great investigators by subcontracting it...

GRANN: (Laughter).

INSKEEP: ...Out to somebody who actually knew what they were doing?

GRANN: He did. They went to an old frontier lawman to help take over the case and they did a good job. But Hoover was desperate to wrap up the case. The Bureau missed a deeper and darker conspiracy that remained unsolved. And I think that's very important to understand.

INSKEEP: How do you know that?

GRANN: Well, many of the Osage began to point me in directions to other unsolved cases within their families going back. What this story really is about - it's not about a story of who did it. It's a story about who didn't do it. When I went to the National Archives in Texas, there was this little booklet. It had a little fabric cover. It - all it was was essentially identifying the name of a guardian and who - which Osage they were in charge of.

And when I began to look at the names of the Osage under them, I could see written next to many of them simply the word dead, dead, dead. You're beginning to realize you're looking at hints of a systematic murder campaign because there's no way all these people died in a span of just a couple years that defied any natural death rate.

And then when you begin to look into each of those individual case, you start to find trails of evidence of suggesting poisonings, a murder. You start to try to trace the money and where the wealth went. What you begin to discover is something even more horrifying than the Bureau ever exposed.

INSKEEP: When you've been poking around in this and revealing this information about a bunch of people's ancestors, what have people said to you?

GRANN: So one of the things that you realize when you spend time in Osage County is that the descendants of both the victims and descendants of the murderers still live there. They often live down the street from each other. And one Osage woman told me we try not to hold them accountable for what their ancestors did. Part of that is the story of America, this intertwining and this kind of reckoning with this original sin that is part of our formation of a country.

And I would say this, I spoke with some of the descendants of the husband of Mollie Burkhart and the uncle who was one of the masterminds of the plot. And they were remarkably candid. And after I finished the book, I received a note from one of the descendants who said, I'm so ashamed that this is part of our history. And please, if you see the Osage, will you please tell them that?

INSKEEP: David Grann is author of the new book "Killers Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI." Thanks very much.

GRANN: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF BRIAN BLADE AND THE FELLOWSHIP BAND'S "STATE LINES")

Photographs:

Ernest and Mollie Burkhart married in 1917. Unbeknownst to Mollie, a member of the Osage tribe, the marriage was part of a larger plot to steal her family's oil wealth.

Mollie Burkhart (second from right) lost all three of her sisters under suspicious circumstances. Rita Smith (left) died in an explosion, Anna Brown (second from left) was shot in the head and Minnie Smith (right) died of what doctors referred to as a "peculiar wasting illness."

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