Can never accuse the Hussein men of having good taste
PUSSSYKATT
--------------------------
BAGHDAD, Iraq - His personal zoo has lions, cheetahs and a bear. His storehouse
has $1 million in fine wines, liquor and heroin. His house has Cuban cigars,
cases of champagne and downloaded pictures of prostitutes. While most Iraqis
suffered under the U.N. sanctions that drove their country into poverty, Saddam
Hussein's eldest son Uday lived a life of fast cars, expensive liquor and easy
women, a tour through his bombed house showed yesterday.
The walls of a gym were plastered with photographs of women downloaded from the
Internet - "the biggest collection of naked women I'd ever seen," said Army
Capt. Ed Ballanco, of Montville, N.J. "It looked like something at the Playboy
Mansion."
Among the photos were those of Jenna and Barbara Bush, President Bush's
21-year-old daughters, "dressed up very nice in evening clothes," Ballanco
said, adding that soldiers took them "to protect the president."
Uday's compound is in a back corner of the Presidential Palace compound, a
small city that boasts six-lane avenues, traffic lights and a hospital. U.S.
soldiers who now occupy the grounds say they believe Uday's portion included a
house, a warehouse, a gym, a gaudy house for women and a zoo.
Scattered among the debris from a bomb that tore through Uday's house and
exploded in a bunker below lay stationery with Uday's name in gold lettering,
photographs of Uday and dozens of copies of Uday's doctoral dissertation, "The
World After the Cold War."
The house also indicated Uday's sybaritic side, something Iraqi dissenters have
told of for decades: a hunger for alcohol, drugs and lots and lots of women.
There were bottles of Cuervo 1800 tequila, Danska vodka and Delamain cognac, as
well as Chimay, Corona and Miller Genuine Draft beers.
There were bags and boxes of pills and medicines everywhere - ginseng sexual
fortifiers, heartburn medication and Prozac - and an Accu-Rite HIV Antibodies
Screening Test Kit in Uday's office.
An e-mail dated Dec. 22, 2000, and signed by a Dr. Jean-Jacques Barrault,
instructed "His Excellency" to undergo electrotherapy for a knee injury and to
swim and ride horses for no more than 40 minutes a day. It prescribed a regimen
of daily exercise.
In 1996, gunmen sprayed bullets at Uday's Porsche, leaving him with a bullet in
his spine that forced him to walk with a cane.
The house was filled with boxes from handguns and piles of magazines, including
"Guns and Ammo" and "Guns," as well as Spanish car magazines and catalogs of
JetSkis.
Soldiers said they found receipts for sports cars signed by Uday. The
underground parking garage and indoor swimming pool were destroyed by bombing
that gutted the center of the house.
In the next-door storehouse were roomfuls of alcohol, tobacco and firearms.
Ballanco estimated the alcohol's worth at $1 million.
There were "Dom Perignon, French wines - all appellation controlee, some 30-40
years old - a lot of very good brandy, a lot of good whiskey," Ballanco said.
"There were boxes of Cuban cigars that said 'Uday Saddam Hussein' on them,
hundreds of them. My guys smoked them."
He said there were also six bags of heroin. He didn't know how much they held.
"There are UNICEF boxes in there with kids' school supplies meant for the
children of Iraq, yet these jerks took it," said Maj. Kent Rideout, 39, of San
Antonio, Texas.
Uday's obsession with sex was evident everywhere. The house was adorned with
paintings of naked women, as well as bundles of Internet printouts of what
appeared to be prostitutes, complete with handwritten ratings of each. One
black book listed hundreds of women's names and phone numbers.
One e-mail printout was a complaint from a woman that she was having a
difficult time finding heterosexual men in Europe.
"Darling, babe, it's not good timing to send me sexy attachment. OH BOY where
am I going to get one guy?" it read in English.
Uday's bed was painted in gold trim, and his bathroom featured a sink and tub
fitted with fixtures in a swan motif.
One house apparently wasn't big enough for Uday's women. To one side, a gaudy
house filled with bedrooms that is now a camp for U.S. soldiers appeared to
once have housed women.
It had statuettes of couples in foreplay, and couches everywhere with fluffy
pillows. And it boasted another swimming pool, with a bar.
"The pink and the cheesiness suggest it was a concubines' house," Ballanco
said.
Behind the house was a pen holding two cheetahs, five lion cubs and a young
bear.
Three German shepherds who guarded the compound have been adopted by soldiers,
who feed them military rations. For the wilder animals, soldiers have been
throwing in sheep from a nearby pen, said Spc. Pete Adams, of Lexington, Va.
A feeding on Sunday, he said, looked "like something from the National
Geographic Channel."
* * *
N.Y. painter is shocked by find at Saddam pad
By DAVE GOLDINER
NY DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
The artist known as Rowena admits her fantasy-art paintings - filled with
snarling dragons, Fabio lookalikes and buxom damsels - can attract an offbeat
clientele.
But Saddam Hussein?
The upstate painter was stunned to learn two of her campy, sexually charged
artworks wound up at the tyrant's love shack in Baghdad.
And now she wants her '80s-vintage paintings back - taloned serpents,
bare-breasted babes and all.
"I would give anything to get them back," said Rowena, whose last name is
Morrill but prefers using only her first name. "I am so upset that they are
there."
"I utterly hate Saddam Hussein," she said. "I loathe everything he is and
everything he stands for."
Rowena, 58, said she did the oil paintings that hung in the dictator's den
about 15 years ago as covers for bodice-ripper paperbacks with titles such as
"King Dragon" and "Shadows Out of Hell."
A busty blond is depicted in one painting conjuring up a forked-tongued serpent
to wrap itself around the body of a hunky bare-chested warrior. In another, a
chained woman clad in a tattered bikini arches her back as a dragon's talons
reach toward her.
Rowena knows no one would ever confuse her with Picasso or Goya - and insisted
her more recent works are much better.
"I know they're not the Madonna by Leonardo da Vinci," she said. "They were
high camp. I always found them hilariously funny."
Rowena was a classically trained artist who studied in Italy but took up the
fantasy genre to support herself after moving to New York in the late '70s.
"I was looking for a way to make a living, and it paid the rent," she said by
phone from her home near Albany.
She sold the two paintings years ago - the one with the dragon went for $20,000
to a Japanese collector - and hadn't heard about them since.
On Sunday, Rowena's sister called to say she had seen one of the paintings on
TV hanging in a secluded townhouse in Baghdad. The pad is believed to have been
used by Saddam to squire his girlfriends.
Rowena said she still can't believe something in her artwork might have touched
a chord in someone as evil as Saddam.
"That would be a horrifying thought," she said. "He in his twisted mind must
have read something into it."
Though she knows she likely has no legal claim to the paintings, she wants them
back. "I don't like the idea of them being in that country," she said.
Navy Lt. Charles Owens, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Qatar, said
Rowena will have to wait to take her case to a new Iraqi government, which will
take control of all of "Saddam's assets."
PHOTO: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/story/75553p-69826c.html
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