Poor Mabel Stubbs.
Ms Stubbs is a good Bahamian woman from Fresh Creek, Andros, and the latest victim of con man Rudy King’s meaningless award ceremonies.
Mr King, who is internationally known as a scounderel and a con man, preys on the naive and the vain by giving out awards that are completely void of credibility.
His most recent con was an awards ceremony where he handed out “Lifetime Achievement Awards”. Some of the recipients, like Mabel Stubbs, probably deserve an award, but certainly something more than a meaningless award presented by a con man.
King was accused in 2002 of stealing over $400,000 from American Express. American Express was awarded a judgment against him but King skipped town and fled back to The Bahamas where he can bask in the protection provided by corrupt Bahamian officials.
Later, King was accused of attempting to defraud the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of $2.7 million by filing a false claim. He went to court in California and had to surrender his passport as a condition of his $10,000 bail. King was also restricted from leaving the state of California.
He jumped bail and returned to The Bahamas where, again, corrupt Bahamian government officials put him back in business.
Rudy’s most recent con is the invention of a silly awards ceremony called the World Citizen Awards in which one of the recipients was a tyrant dictator from Swaziland.
King created a website to give his awards ceremony some undeserved legitimacy. The site featured a list of “trustees” that included prominent people from around the globe.
The problem was that none of the people were involved in Mr Kings’ scam in any way whatsoever.
A lawyer for the World Peace Foundation publicly stated that the trustees list on Rudy’s World Citizen Award web site was stolen without authorizaton from the web site of the World Peace Foundation, a well-respected NGO in the United States. Neither the World Peace Foundation nor its Board members were connected with Rudy King’s phony ‘World Citizen Award.’
King had previously tried the same scam in Bermuda where, in 2006, he planned an award ceremony that was to feature retired South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Hollywood stars Halle Berry and Will Smith among the luminaries headed to Bermuda for “Global Vision Awards of Excellence” event.
Bermuda tourism officials and spokespersons for the celebrities involved denied any involvement, and the event was never held.
In 2009, commercial crime cops in the Bahamas arrested King after he was fined $500 for deceiving three public officers in connection with a “lost” passport. An IRS agent testified at the trial and produced Mr King’s missing passport, which had been confiscated by the U.S. government after a U.S. district judge has issued a no-bail arrest warrant for King in connection with the IRS case.
