Ohio-Somali-v4

Inside Ohio’s Home Health Empire: 7 Buildings, 288 Medicaid Companies, $250 Million

DOGE

Medicaid

Medicaid Millionaires

Ohio

Special Reporting

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
In my formative years, my perception of diamonds, engagements, and proposals was shaped largely by my favorite films from Hollywood’s Golden Age. From Audrey Hepburn in &#8220;Breakfast at Tiffany’s&#8221; gazing pensively into the Tiffany windows like a tourist craning up at the Sistine Chapel to Marilyn Monroe in &#8220;Gentlemen Prefer Blondes&#8221; enshrining the doctrine that “diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” these were the images that first taught me what romance was meant to look like. In such enduring portrayals, elegance came packaged in little blue boxes; they conveyed all the glitz and glamour a young romantic could imagine.
So when the time came to think seriously about proposing, the engagement ring in my mind had six prongs and a center stone, though I lacked the terminology to describe it as such at the time. And, as a willing victim of advertising, I did believe the best things came in blue.
Having since plunged into the world of engagement rings and diamonds, I have been reliably informed that I was mistaken. Jewelry is intensely personal, and an engagement ring is the most personal of all.
Women may still want the thrill of a proposal, but they generally also want some say — and final approval — over the ring’s design. They want to know it is coming, just not exactly when. Despite Hollywood’s portrayals, proposals are rarely shocking; more often, they are carefully forewarned surprises (sort of like the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound). If this strikes you as contradictory, I refer you to Oscar Wilde, who once remarked that women are meant to be loved, not understood.
In any case, fear not, gentlemen: I shall share what I have learned. Women, too, may glean something from it, as many of my own lessons came from consulting my girlfriend.
The engagement-ring market, as I discovered, is not a single industry so much as several overlapping ones. At the top sit luxury houses like Tiffany and Cartier, where one pays a handsome premium for heritage, branding (I soon learned the more apropos slogan is that the most marked-up things come in blue), and the carefully curated experience of buying there, right down to Cartier’s complimentary Champagne. Beneath them are the conventional retail jewelers found in malls, offering convenience and ready-made inventory but still carrying substantial markup. Then come wholesale independent jewelers, who source stones directly and can create custom rings, usually without grand showrooms but with greater flexibility and better value. Finally, there is the vintage, estate, and resale market, where buyers seek out older or previously owned rings for their character, individuality, or potential savings.
For the uninitiated, natural diamonds are typically judged according to the famous four Cs: cut, carat, clarity, and color. Carat refers to weight, though most people understandably think of it as size; roughly 0.9 to 1.5 carats is a common range. Cut, confusingly, does not refer to shape, but to how well the stone has been fashioned to catch and reflect light. Shape is its own category: round is the old standby, while cuts such as cushion, oval, pear, and emerald drift in and out of fashion with the tides of taste. Clarity and color, meanwhile, measure the degree of internal imperfections and tint, ranging from the visibly flawed to the nearly immaculate.
To put this in perspective with actual prices, a high-quality one-carat diamond ring from Tiffany — say, G color, VVS1 clarity, and an excellent cut — starts at around $20,000. If, instead, you skip the luxury tier and visit the sort of jewelry store your mother might browse in the mall while your father is off trying on shoes, a similarly specced ring will run closer to $8,000. Then there is the route I ultimately took: an independent jeweler recommended by a recently wed friend. There is no grand showroom, so it requires more preparation; you need to know what you want. But, as I learned, you can show such a jeweler the $20,000 Tiffany ring of your dreams and have it replicated for $5,000. Mine even told me that, if I were desperate enough, he could source the Tiffany box and papers, too. “I know a guy,” he said.
But knockoff Tiffany papers are not the only route to discount luxury in the jewelry world. You may have heard of lab-grown diamonds. With recent leaps in technology, lab-grown diamonds in the late 2010s were to the diamond industry what quartz watches were to Swiss horology in the 1980s: a major disruptor and a tech-driven solution to a laborious and difficult-to-source product. They have become so uniformly high in color and clarity that the old precision of diamond grading increasingly feels beside the point. As one jeweler explained to me, they are visually flawless diamonds, cost roughly $100 per carat to manufacture, and retail for somewhere between $500 and $1,500 per carat. They are cheap, plentiful, and readily available — ideal, if your ambition is to tone your fiancée’s arm by weighing it down with a baseball-sized behemoth that, if naturally mined, would fetch a price rivaling that of an exotic sports car. Even affluent clients, the jeweler told me, often opt for lab-grown when faced with the choice between spending $5,000 and $300,000 on what is, to the naked eye, effectively the same stone.
Given the striking disparity in cost and virtual lack thereof in appearance, why would anyone opt for a natural diamond over lab? Some bleeding-heart voices will still invoke the specter of blood diamonds. But with the Kimberley Process — the international certification scheme for rough diamonds — now covering roughly 99.8% of global rough-diamond production, it is exceedingly difficult to turn your proposal plans into a vehicle for financing African warlord insurgencies, even if you were so inclined. The decision instead comes down to preference, provenance, and resale value. They say diamonds are forever, but not all diamonds hold their value forever. Though no diamonds should be thought of as investments or reliable stores of value, natural diamonds will at least retain some fraction of what you paid; their lab-grown counterparts, however, retain virtually no resale value at all.
There is also something undeniably romantic about a natural diamond being more than a billion years old. In a world of fast and disposable fashion, it has an advantage over modern consumer goods in that it predates civilization and will certainly outlast it. If that connection to older, grander, and less synthetic worlds appeals to you, old mine-cut and old European-cut diamonds are also worth considering over the modern brilliant cut.
These were styles associated with the Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, and Art Deco eras, evolving from the squarish, hand-cut old mine style to the rounder old European before the modern brilliant arrived with the technical precision to maximize sparkle. The older cuts were fashioned to be admired under candlelight, before the widespread adoption of electric bulbs, giving them a softer, moodier glow. They feel closer in spirit to the sparkling socialites of the Gilded Age than to the moneyed influencers of social media. In the end, the European cut was the one we chose. It was a beautiful and singular stone and, as the jeweler explained, much harder to come by in such higher-grade colors and clarities: “I can get 10 of these brilliant-cut diamonds for you tomorrow. This European one? I can maybe find a handful a year.”
The jeweler also explained that, in certain friend groups and social circles, there is increasing pressure toward larger stones. “If all her friends are showing off massive three-carat diamonds, maybe she doesn’t want a quaint 1.2-carat natural.” Thankfully, this was not my predicament; none of my girlfriend’s friends are married yet.
Lab-grown diamonds, for all the snobbery they may still attract, have also democratized entry into a world once guarded by prohibitive prices. A young man no longer needs to bankrupt himself or delay proposing for a decade to participate in marriage. Engagement rings may be, in part, an offshoot of marketing and media, but they are now as fixed a feature of our culture as diamonds themselves, and, like refusing to read the directions or carrying all the groceries from the car in a single trip, seem to have become one of those things expected of us men.
The old Tiffany fantasy still has its charm, but romance, as it turns out, is not a faithful reenactment of a Billy Wilder script. Rather, it is learning what the woman you love actually wants and then finding a way (within budget) to give it to her. By the way, she said yes.
***
Harry Khachatrian (<a href="https://x.com/harry1t6">@Harry1T6</a>) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at <a href="https://www.betweenbottles.com/">BetweenBottles.com</a>.

GettyImages-2192531531

Inside The Diamond Game, Where The Same Ring Can Cost $5K Or $20K Depending On One Choice

Marriage

Upstream

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Just before the Department of Government Efficiency closed its doors, it made a quiet move that may end up as its most lasting impact on the federal deficit.
DOGE <a href="https://opendata.hhs.gov/datasets/medicaid-provider-spending/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published a massive trove of data</a> in February that, for the first time, lets the public see what companies are billing Medicaid for. For decades, the payouts have been shrouded in secrecy. One of the largest government programs was a black box.
I’ve spent the past two months diving into the numbers. What I found was the most blatant waste of federal dollars that I have encountered in my two decades as an investigative reporter.
This is the first part of &#8220;Medicaid Millions,” a Daily Wire series exposing billions of dollars in dubious “personal services” payments where people are paid to spend time with their own family.
I set my sights on Ohio, which like Minnesota, has been granted <a href="https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/section-1115-demo/demonstration-and-waiver-list/Waiver-Descript-Factsheet/OH#0198" target="_blank" rel="noopener">waivers</a> to expand Medicaid well beyond its original purpose. Under the guise of health care, Ohio pays people to go to Medicaid beneficiaries’ homes to perform “homemaking” and “chores” like cooking and cleaning. The people performing these “personal services” tasks don’t even have to be health care workers — and in many cases, are actually relatives of the Medicaid recipient.
According to a Daily Wire data analysis, Ohio spent a billion dollars on home health care in 2024, the last year for which data is available.
Since the services are performed inside private residences, there is no way to know whether the workers went at all, or what they&#8217;re actually doing in exchange for taxpayer funds. An infinite number of small black boxes inside a black box. Multiple signs said the service provided, and billed to the government, was sometimes just “companionship &amp; conversation.”
As people have realized the United States government will pay them to hang out with their own families, northeast Columbus has seen its economy replaced by businesses that bill Medicaid. And Columbus, a city with the second largest Somali population in the country, has become, on the surface, the most unhealthy city on the planet.
“Well if the government is going to pay you to do it,” one home health operator told me. “People see it as lucrative, so they just jump on it.”
The new welfare queens aren’t the recipients whose low incomes qualify them for poverty programs. They’re the companies getting rich off them.
<div id="attachment_1088861" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1088861" class="wp-image-1088861" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/billboard-1024x548.jpg" alt="A billboard in Columbus / Luke Rosiak" width="630" height="337" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/billboard-1024x548.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/billboard-300x161.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/billboard-768x411.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/billboard-1536x823.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/billboard.jpg 1813w" sizes=" (max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px" />A billboard in Columbus / Luke Rosiak</div>
Driving down Cleveland Avenue, in less than 40 seconds, you come across endless home health companies. Capital Home Health; Continental Home Health; Dynamic Home Healthcare; Ohio Senior Home Healthcare. Entire buildings throughout the city are filled entirely with what appear to be identical businesses.
The enormous complex pictured below is 6161 Busch Boulevard. Its lack of windows would be a problem for most office buildings, but there is almost no one in this one. What’s inside is 94 different companies signed up to bill Medicaid, each with a tiny office, often marked with a sheet of paper proclaiming some generic company name ending in “Home Health LLC” — and sometimes another piece of paper claiming the employees had just stepped out for a break.
This building alone billed taxpayers $66 million in the span of a few years, the records show.
<div id="attachment_1088839" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1088839" class="wp-image-1088839" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/unnamed-1.jpg" alt="" width="630" height="473" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/unnamed-1.jpg 512w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/05/unnamed-1-300x225.jpg 300w" sizes=" (max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px" />Luke Rosiak / The Daily Wire</div>
Pick the owner of a Columbus home health care company at random and look him up in public records, and you are likely to go down an endless rabbit hole: years of unpaid taxes and debts, sometimes criminal records, and an astonishing number of LLCs created in other industries, as if the millions they make from Medicaid are just a side gig.
We went down several of those rabbit holes. In the coming days, you&#8217;ll meet:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A politician who founded an $11 million home health care company that he appeared to run part-time — without even mentioning it in his political biography — who funded his campaign with donations from other home health care owners.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A woman who reinvented her janitorial LLC as a &#8220;health&#8221; provider, then billed Medicaid nearly $100,000 the first month.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A landlord who bought airplanes after renting space to hundreds of home health care companies that billed Medicaid a quarter of a billion dollars.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A million-dollar Medicaid business owned by a couple with repeated fraud, violence, and theft convictions.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A man who went to prison for Medicaid fraud but told the government he was too broke to pay restitution, while his neighbors and associates preside over a poverty-program empire.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">An accountant who lost his license for stealing public funds, then opened a $7 million home health company using the address of a convicted money launderer&#8217;s teenage son.</li>
</ul>
These are not business geniuses, nor even people with any training or specialty in the health field. They have often failed at a variety of businesses before suddenly becoming millionaires in home health care.
Sometimes a company will have a full roster of clients in its very first month, making one wonder where the clients come from. The companies don’t have websites or appear to advertise. They can’t stand out from their thousands of rivals based on price, unless they pay kickbacks, because the government pays the same to everyone.
Nearly every owner of home health care companies in Columbus appears to be foreign. They live in a parallel society, where every associate in public records also has a foreign name, and all their business transactions are conducted with other foreigners.
When we asked one what home health care companies did, one man threatened: “Journalists? Who cares? Do you guys pay my bills? I’m going to tell everybody you guys are racist.”
The government cannot be meaningfully monitoring all the people it writes million-dollar checks to in Columbus. They all share combinations of just a few names, like Ahmed Mohamed and Mohamed Ahmed. Documents reviewed by The Daily Wire show individuals will spell their own name multiple different ways within a single document. And many of them list their birthday as January 1, because their birthdates are unknown.
The business model is simple: a 40-year-old Somali immigrant gets paid for spending time with, and maybe cooking for, his own 65-year-old mother. The middleman is one of thousands of &#8220;home health&#8221; firms that have the “NPI” number necessary to bill Medicaid.
The 40-year-old becomes an &#8220;employee&#8221; of that company, but has no clients other than his mother. There is no way to verify whether he actually even provided the &#8220;services&#8221; — unless his own mother is willing to testify against him.
Two months. Millions of documents. A full investigative team. That&#8217;s what this story required. Most outlets can&#8217;t afford work like this, which is why it doesn&#8217;t happen. We&#8217;ve chosen to make it happen. <a href="https://get.dailywire.com/fight/?utm_campaign=missional&amp;utm_medium=editorial&amp;utm_source=article&amp;utm_content=medicaid">Support more of it by becoming a member of Daily Wire.</a>
This poverty program is different from things like food stamps, because it has no monetary cap and its extent is decided not by politicians, but by any doctor willing to sign a form saying you could use some help around the house. It only takes one doctor who will say yes to churn out enough forms to bankrupt a state.
For years, efforts to rein in waste have nibbled around the edges, shaving off a million here and a million there, while skeptics — and liberals — argued that the cost-cutting exercise was pointless because the lion’s share of federal spending was locked up in “non-discretionary” spending like health care.
The implication was that there was no waste in that category, and nothing that could be done about it, even as the nation careened towards insolvency. That premise couldn’t be more wrong.
This blatant waste happened within miles of the Ohio state capitol, where Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, and his appointees run the state. In an age of artificial intelligence, the Medicaid system has seemed disinterested in even the most obvious red flags. Perhaps that’s because it’s largely run by states, but with half or more of the bill being footed by federal taxpayers.
The Trump administration is now turning its sights to Medicaid fraud with a task force led by Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Vice President JD Vance. They may want to start with Vance’s home state.
Parker Thayer, an investigator for the Capital Research Center, contributed to this report.
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Editorial-Somalis-final-v2_Article Page Graphic 1920×1080 Part 1

DW Investigation Reveals One Of The Biggest Government Waste Scandals Hiding In Plain Sight

Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

Fraud

J.D. Vance

The Daily Wire dives into the incredible details of one of America’s most daring rescue missions in a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/daily-wire-explains-the-world-ep-8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">mini documentary</a> that hit the platform on Thursday.
Just over a month after the United States launched its massive military operation against Iran, a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down by Iranian forces on April 3, sending the fighter jet’s two crew members directly into enemy territory.
It marked the first time in more than 20 years that a U.S. warplane was lost to enemy fire, but President Donald Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth had a bigger problem: finding the missing Americans and bringing them home.
The jet’s pilot was rescued by U.S. forces within hours, but the weapons system officer, a colonel who ejected from the jet, vanished in some of the most remote and treacherous terrain on earth.
Back in Washington, U.S. officials quickly drew up a daring plan to rescue the colonel before Iranian forces could capture him. American officials knew the stakes. Either an American soldier would fall into the hands of a terrorist regime, die of dehydration, or the U.S. military would go into hostile territory and get him.
The next 48 hours would prove to be one of the greatest success stories in American military history, a rescue that President Donald Trump called an “Easter miracle.”
The Daily Wire’s “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/daily-wire-explains-the-world-ep-8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Race To Rescue</a>” provides a detailed account of the incredible mission to find the missing U.S. colonel and bring him home. “The Race To Rescue” is now available exclusively for DailyWire+ members.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/daily-wire-explains-the-world-ep-8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: THE RACE TO RESCUE</a>
<iframe loading="lazy" title="The Race to Rescue | First Look" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_Vikl-XYz34?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The Race To Rescue

How The U.S. Pulled Off One Of The Greatest Rescue Missions In Military History

Daily Wire

Donald Trump

Iran

Pete Hegseth

Trump Administration

U.S. Military

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
When Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles and Queen Camilla would visit the United States to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence, I knew I had to call Mark Helprin.
The bestselling author’s fifth novel, 2005’s “Freddy and Fredericka,” is a thinly veiled sendup of Charles and Princess Diana — who, in this case, must travel to America and recapture “the colonies” in order to be blessed by an immortal, magical falcon who selects the true kings of England.
If you’ve never read one of Helprin’s novels, that summary is a pretty good glimpse into the experience: discursive and funny with a healthy shake of magical realism.
“Freddy and Fredericka” is a darkly comic romp across the United States that finds our heroes falling in love with the country they were sent to recapture, urging Americans to “let everything in the nation flow through you” and to return to “your original principles … immaterial and bright, ever enduring.”
It’s been more than a decade since I first read “Freddy and Fredericka,” and I’ve returned again and again to this book, essentially “Democracy In America” in novel form. So I was excited to ask Helprin how much Tocqueville was on his mind while he wrote the novel.
“He wasn’t,” Helprin said, for one simple reason: He had never read Tocqueville.
He was, however, in the process of reading “Democracy in America” in French, along with &#8220;The Wealth of Nations,&#8221; another classic he’s never gotten to. Shakespeare and Dante are in heavy rotation, however, as is fiction until the Lost Generation. Nothing after Fitzgerald and Hemingway holds much interest for Helprin, which, he stresses, has everything to do with his personal taste and nothing to do with snobbery.
There’s nothing about Helprin’s oeuvre or demeanor that would suggest he is anything other than well-read. But if yielding at Dos Passos for some reason stirs up doubts about Helprin’s literacy, the thousands of volumes that line the shelves of Helprin&#8217;s Charlottesville home should put them to rest. I once heard that Helprin has every paper he’s ever written, going back to his undergraduate career at Harvard, if not high school.
I didn’t ask him about this because I didn’t want it to not be true. After our conversation, I’m certain it is.
Helprin is everything you want him to be. Smartly dressed in a light check blazer, occasionally self-effacing and always captivating, he’s like a character from one of his novels — the latest of which, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Elegy-Blue-Novel-Mark-Helprin/dp/1419786083">“Elegy In Blue,”</a> hits shelves this week. All told, he’s written nine novels, three collections of short stories, and three children&#8217;s books illustrated by “Jumanji” author Chris Van Allsburg.
In addition, Helprin maintains a steady stream of political commentary, weighing in on everything from copyright law to foreign policy. Helprin’s fans, myself included, say he’s one of the greatest living American novelists. Helprin almost certainly wouldn’t say that about himself, which is likely why, despite a half-century in the public eye, he manages to fly somewhat under the radar.
Helprin’s relative anonymity is especially ironic considering his downright cinematic backstory. His mother was an actress in the Golden Age of Hollywood who left the Silver Screen to join the Group Theatre, a famous Method acting collective. His father, an American commando who worked for Winston Churchill during the Second World War, later became the head of London Films. It was there, in an office in Mayfair, that the first seeds for “Freddy and Fredericka” were planted by the king and queen themselves.
“Part of his job was, when the Queen and Prince Philip wanted to see a film, they would come in one Rolls Royce, no security or anything like that,” Helprin recalls. “He would greet them on the sidewalk and then escort them upstairs and into the screening room, where there was a buffet laid out with caviar and shrimp and everything, champagne, whatever.”
“And they would sit down, and then he would introduce the film, tell them about how it was made, what the subject was, whatever screen the film,” he continues. “And then afterwards, he would take questions from them, if they had any, and then escort them down to the street and see them off and say, thank you very much for coming.”
“They never thanked him, ever,” Helprin notes.
Helprin never forgot that. Not as he did his graduate work, which kept him at Harvard before taking him to Oxford; not during his time in the Israel Defense Forces, a tour of duty he embarked on after he was asked — and declined — to move to Cairo and serve as the Middle East editor for the New York Times.
Somewhere toward the end of his itinerant youth, he began a career as a writer. His first novel, “Refiner’s Fire,” was published in 1977. He achieved mainstream success with 1983’s “Winter’s Tale” and 1991’s “A Soldier Of The Great War.”
&nbsp;
<div id="attachment_1086299" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1086299" class="wp-image-1086299 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-50466632.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="655" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-50466632.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-50466632-300x192.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-50466632-900x576.jpg 900w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-50466632-768x491.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Photo by Mario Ruiz/Getty Images</div>
It was during a three-month book tour for the latter novel that the seeds planted by his family’s royal connection finally began to sprout. It was the &#8217;90s, and Charles and Di were all over the news. Seeing a man and a woman washing dishes at a restaurant kitchen one night, one of his daughters asked if the scullions were the duke and duchess.
Helprin saw an opportunity for “misapprehension,” which he calls “the funniest part of all humor.”
“If you think about the royals in Britain, they have so much opportunity for that because they live in a completely different world,” Helprin says. “But there&#8217;s even greater opportunity if they&#8217;re here amongst the colonials incognito.”
“Freddy and Fredericka” was a success in the United States. It was not published in Britain, where audiences were less receptive to Helprin’s take on the monarchy. Helprin has no regrets.
“I mocked the royals because they&#8217;re mockable,” he says. “They&#8217;re insanely mockable. They&#8217;re freaks, right? And they live in a freakish world.”
But Helprin appreciates that by separating their head of state and the head of government, the British monarchy “allows a really stable, decent government.” That attitude didn’t fly with “the loony Left” across the pond.
At least one person in Great Britain received a copy, however.
“Just by chance, I was invited to dinner that Prince Charles was supposed to attend in Washington, D.C.,” Helprin recalls. “And I said, &#8216;Well, you know what I better do? I better send Freddy and Fredericka to the palace,’ because, you know, to give them advance warning you don&#8217;t want to sandbag people.”
“So I sent it to the palace,” he explains, “and then without any word whatsoever, I was just disinvited to the dinner.”
Had he met Charles, Helprin says, he would have “approached him as an American.”
“We don&#8217;t believe that people are born with privilege, that, in other words, that privilege is legitimate, that they&#8217;re entitled to it, and we see them eye to eye,” Helprin adds. “That&#8217;s what America is about, and that there&#8217;s a very, very powerful force behind that, our history, our power, our ethos and the founding, which was, I think, divinely inspired.”
“If I&#8217;m sitting across from the King of England,” Helprin says, “I don&#8217;t feel lesser in any way.”
It’s a line that could have been spoken by most of Helprin’s protagonists. The typical Helprin hero is a kind of Aristotelian great-souled man with a Brooklyn accent. Most of Helprin’s novels take place in and around New York City, where Helprin was born and lived the first five years of his life, and a city that still captivates him and feels like home, despite the oppressive scale of “way too tall” buildings and the scourge of bike messengers zipping around with food, &#8220;because everybody has to have instant gratification.”
Of all Helprin’s New York novels, “Winter’s Tale” stands alone. Set simultaneously at the turns of the 20th and 21st centuries, the novel has at least 100 characters, a lengthy subplot about rival 19th-century newspaper barons, a magical realist upstate New York town with its own magic language, and a flying white horse.
That barely scratches the surface of what “Winter’s Tale” is about, and I’m not sure I could accurately describe it if I tried. The book has stuck with me, almost haunted me, for years. Whenever I’ve read another of Helprin’s books, I hope to find within it the key to understanding it. I never have.
Helprin, it seems, is in the same boat.
“I can&#8217;t explain it, but it possessed me day and night,” he says. “I would spend days in the New York Historical Society … and I&#8217;d walk the streets, looking at things and getting very, very obsessed and emotional about it.”
“So in a sense, I&#8217;m not the one to explain it, because it seizes me as much as other people who report that it did the same to them,” Helprin adds. “I felt as if I was just a medium of something that was speaking through me.”
To the extent that the book is about one thing, Helprin says, it’s about justice. Divine justice.
“People say God works in mysterious ways. Well, they&#8217;re not necessarily mysterious,” he says — they just come “from the past.”
“Who said that everything has to be made right in the timeline that we can perceive? Maybe it&#8217;s different, maybe from the divine perspective, the timeline is infinitely long, and the balances are affected and affect justice over a long period of time, so that after an injustice, maybe 20 years later, there&#8217;s some sort of a compromise,” Helprin adds.
“If you look at the whole of humanity and the whole of the universe as being one construct, if you think that from the divine perspective, that&#8217;s what it is, because you see from very far away, and it&#8217;s as one thing actually, without time.”
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<div id="attachment_1086301" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1086301" class="wp-image-1086301 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-502546985.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="763" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-502546985.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-502546985-300x224.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-502546985-773x576.jpg 773w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-502546985-768x572.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Photo by John Mahler/Toronto Star via Getty Images</div>
We mortals, of course, cannot see as God sees. But this is what Helprin aims to do in his novels. More than that, it’s how he sees the world, day in and day out.
“If you ask my wife, she would tell you, it&#8217;s very difficult to be married to me,” he says. “Very, very difficult.”
To stay grounded while thinking these lofty thoughts, Helprin works. He has been an agricultural worker, a surveyor, a dishwasher, and a stevedore.
“I spend so much time working, doing hard, physical, exhausting labor, that while I&#8217;m doing that often I think of things and think of what I&#8217;m going to do about the book, and when I get the chance to actually write the book, I’m so grateful for it because it&#8217;s different from, you know, spending hours on a tractor in the hot sun or getting rid of trees that fall,” he says. “So you come in from the heat and the dust and the dirt and the blood — if you work on a farm, you&#8217;re gonna have a lot of blood, and you&#8217;ll be lucky if you keep your fingers when you come in — then you have a refuge. And it&#8217;s a great privilege.”
“It&#8217;s almost like — to return to where we started — almost like being a royal,” he adds.
Helprin is on the cusp of turning 80, and while he says nothing to suggest that he wants to give up the punishing labor that’s driven so much of his life (and allowed him never to take a publisher’s advance), mortality is at least a little on his mind.
“Elegy In Blue,” he notes, “is probably not going to be my last book, as I&#8217;m working on another one. But, who knows, I may not be able to finish the other one. I might die before I do.”
Like his novels, Helprin feels neither outdated nor contemporary. He is a man out of time, a bridge between this century and the last who would likely feel equally at home in both. He speaks as he writes, and he lives like the characters he creates, a true American original.
But, unsurprisingly, the anti-monarchist with Tory sensibilities does miss the world he grew up in.
“I have to say, I do miss it, I really do,” he says. “When you&#8217;re going to be 80, then you&#8217;ll probably miss it, too. You know, that&#8217;s the way it is. And it&#8217;s okay.”

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