Gadhafi's pen-pal, Louis Schlamowitz.
No matter how you spell his name, Moammar Gadhafi was a reviled man living on borrowed time.
One florist in New York gave the Libyan dictator sage advice, but he opted not to follow it, and not so long afterward the deposed leader was killed. Louis Schlamowitz, 81, was a pen pal with Gadhafi since the late 1960s. He has scrapbooks full of letters and autographed pictures he has received from the former dictator and other leaders. The florist, who is Jewish, wrote in his letters his opinions on Libya’s relationship with Israel and other Middle Eastern countries, and received letters from Gadhafi bashing the United States for its involvement in the Middle East. Schlamowitz ended his correspondence once Gadhafi and Libya were tied to the Lockerbie Pan Am bombings in Scotland in 1988.
He wrote one last time to the dictator six months ago when rebels began to rise up to take their country back from the tyrant. Schlamowitz wrote, ‘If you don’t take care of your people, your people will take care of you.’ The letter was returned unopened to New York.
The New York senior citizen’s unusual hobby of writing with political leaders has gotten him in a bit of hot water in the past. Schlamowitz was paid a visit by CIA agents a few times, but one look at his enormous scrapbooks filled with correspondences and autographed photos from the likes of both President Harry Truman and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini were enough evidence for the CIA to leave the man and his letters alone. I guess Schlamowitz isn’t the type to wait around and find famous political autographs inside used books. Who says writing letters in cursive is a dying art?
