Orbán Bagman and ‘Other Loyal Servants of Organized Crime’
A brief conversation with Alex Alvarova about Hungary etc.
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Bette’s Happy Hour on Tuesday with disinformation analysts Dietmar Pichler and Alex Alvarova was one of our finest — the exchange of information from our global community was phenomenal.
I kicked off the event by talking about how I’m framing the world at the moment between those pushing illusion and those living in reality. The illusionists create phantoms — this week’s model is ‘antifa’ — a conjured phantom to defang the word ‘fascist’ so the illusionists can target political enemies.
Those of us rooted in reality are duty bound to puncture the illusions.
At one point during our meeting, Alvarova was describing a better framework for discussing the current wave of authoritarian leaders.
She said what they really are is simple:
“They are loyal servants of organized crime.”—Alex Alvarova at Bette’s Happy Hour, October 14, 2025
And she went on to describe how Viktor Orbán is a key node of this organized crime ring.
“Whenever you look, whatever you open, everything comes back to Orbán, a second rate politician, little Mussolini of a tiny Middle European state,” she said. “He started his career as a bagman for Russian Organized crime and all he ever did was this job. And look who else is chipping away our democracies. All the little Mussolinis of our time are just loyal servants of organized crime. Starting with Fico (Slovakia) through Netanyahu to Trump. All they really want is ‘to crime’ in the open and avoid jail.”
These aren’t peacemakers — these are practiced mobsters delivering Reality TV Fascism to the masses, transactional men hoping to avoid prison and the Gaddafi ending.
More than two years ago, I reported that Tucker Carlson’s dad worked for a company that stooged for Orbán and how written into the contract was the requirement that Orbán’s goons had to appear on Carlson’s Fox show.
On March 8, 2023, I wrote:
Tucker Carlson’s dad, 82-year-old Richard Carlson, is the director of a Washington-based firm that lobbied for Orbán in the United States, according to the firm’s website.
Orbán, you might recall, is Hungary’s authoritarian leader, whose anti-human rights actions are being modeled by the Republican party.
You might also recall, Tucker Carlson broadcast his show from Hungary in 2021, in advance of attending an extremist conference in Budapest.
The bottom line - Tucker met with Orbán after a firm where his father is a director received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Hungarian Government to help reputation wash the Orbán regime.
As my investigative writing colleague Sian Norris reported for Byline Times:
Carlson met Prime Minister Viktor Orbán during his trip, two years after the Hungarian Government paid $265,000 to Policy Impact Strategic Communications Inc (sometimes known as Policy Impact Communications or Policy Impact) to “provide outreach to the U.S. Government and media on behalf of the Embassy of Hungary in support of its ongoing objectives to improve US-Hungarian relations, by coordinating, facilitating, and managing Government affairs, activities and media management.”
The deal included co-ordinating an interview with Peter Szijjártó, Hungary’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, on the Tucker Carlson show.
Carlson’s father, former US Ambassador to the Seychelles Richard Carlson, is a Director of the Washington D.C-based lobbying firm. Senior advisor William Cowen also has links to Fox News.
Tucker Carlson, who is currently creating unreality around January 6 to cover for knowingly promoting 2020 election lies, according to Dominion Voting System’s court filings, went to Hungary to promote fascist propaganda and his father, Dick, is a director of a lobbying group that promotes Orbán.
Okay, got it.
Sian also wrote:
This is not the first time Carlson has shown his support to Orbán and his Fidesz Party.
In 2019 – the same year the deal was struck between his father’s business and the Hungarian Embassy – Carlson delivered a monologue on his Fox News show praising Orban’s family protection programme.
Norris explained that the programme seeks to incentivise women to have more “ethnic Hungarian children”, awarding women a loan on marriage that is written off should she have three children or more with her husband.
In his monologue, Carlson explained that Hungary had lost “half a million of its population” due to low birth rates and that the “neoliberals” who “run the European Union” believed the country could fix that problem by importing a “replacement population from the third world”.
In essence, he was doing extremist racist propaganda, Great Replacement, on primetime.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Bette Dangerous, March 8, 2023
Today, geopolitical analyst Dr. Michael MacKay, who has closely followed Trump’s announcement that he plans to meet with Putin in Hungary, wrote:
“Dictator Putin just won another stunning victory over his Useful Idiot Trump. There will be a ‘summit’ between Putin and his regional governors Trump and Orbán in Budapest. Putin again held off any consequences for the genocidal war of aggression Russia wages against Ukraine.”
I asked Alvarova, who grew up in Czechoslovakia under Soviet rule, if she’s psychic, having directed our conversation toward Orbán’s Hungary on Tuesday, two days before the story broke.
She laughed and said, “I just have two words: Dietmar Clodo.”
So I followed the lead to this archived affidavit from Clodo — a German national who lived in Hungary in the ‘90s. The affidavit from a decade ago focused on ‘Orbán’s corruption by the Solntsevskaya Group.’
Clodo’s words:
“In the 1990s, I lived in Budapest, where I was doing consulting and owned a private security company, SAS. There I met a well-known businessman, Semyon Mogilevich. We established relations of trust, partially because both of us were religious Jews. In the mid-1990s — actually between 1993 and 1996 — he asked me to hand over cash to various people. One of them was Sándor Pintér [the current Hungarian Minister of Interior Affairs]. At that time, I only knew that he was a senior police officer and that he was working for Mr. Mogilevich. I was officially introduced to him later, after he quit his job with the police. It happened in 1996/1997. Semyon Mogilevich asked me to hand him money, and I did so. It was clear to me that these people were influential. For me, Sándor Pintér was just one out of many corrupt people to whom I handed envelopes containing cash on behalf of Mogilevich. He and other people used to come to my home on Meggy Utca 19, in the third district of Budapest. They used to take money in envelopes, 10,000 Deutsche Marks each. This practice continued through 1996; later, the money was transferred through somebody else. Once, in the spring of 1994, on the eve of the parliamentary elections, Mogilevich’s interpreter brought me a suitcase containing almost one million Deutsche Marks.
This money was supposed to be handed to a young man. However, the young man refused to enter my home. I told him: ‘Listen, I have the suitcase with the damn money, and I am not going to step out onto the street with this cash. If you refuse to enter, I’ll give the suitcase containing the million back to Mr. Mogilevich. I don’t care.’ He went up to my place with another older-looking gentleman, and I handed over the suitcase with cash. I didn’t care who he was. Only after the parliamentary elections did I realize that the young man was Viktor Orbán from the Fidesz. Mogilevich called it ‘a crucial contribution to the electoral campaign’. Other people who regularly visited me to collect their fees included László Tonhauzer, who at that time was the head of the Budapest Police Organized Crime Division; former Senior Police Investigator, István Sándor; and László Juszt, an influential media man.
The main reason I was assigned to this money-transfer task was that I had nothing to do with the Russians, and, as the international section chief of the independent Hungarian Commercial and Industrial Chamber, I was seen as a serious man. I declare, under penalty of perjury, that I have told the truth.”
Dietmar Clodo
Regensburg
15/06/2016
Alvarova is correct, viewing these men as loyal servants of organized crime is a far more accurate framework than trying to view through any traditional political lens.
I find myself frequently returning to this quote from Dr. Michael MacKay:
“At our stage of the fight, we don’t care why the Italians brought Mussolini to power. We care how they came to string him up on a meat hook.”—Dr. Michael MacKay, geopolitical analyst, for Hot Type in Byline Supplement, August 9, 2025
I think all these little Mussolinis may need to remember how his story ended. Or maybe that’s just it: they know how it goes and will do or say anything to avoid being forced out of their government subsidized housing.
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So we are seeing the efforts by the criminals to consolidate their impunity https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/oct/17/viktor-orban-vladimir-putin-volodymyr-zelenskyy-donald-trump-europe-latest-news-updates-russia-ukraine-war