Iran’s wacky leader has to buy his friends.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, known for changing his clothes only once a week, offered $1,500 to guests to dine with him at the Warwick hotel Tuesday night, sources said.
And he’s done so for years during his annual trips to New York to address the United Nations.
“He pays you to come,” said an Iranian woman who was among a group of protesters outside the hotel and declined to be identified.
“It’s $1,500 to have dinner with him.”
She said her friend, an Iranian artist whose work Ahmadinejad admires, gets invited every year.
“He says no. He’s against them. But he fears them. So he makes up an excuse,” she said.
The guests, a selection of prominent expatriates, attended the low-key affair at the Warwick’s Murals on 54 restaurant, which was closed the entire week for Ahmadinejad’s use.
Such payments are customary, says Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, an influential Iranian activist.
“They basically rent a crowd,” she said.
“It’s a tradition that goes back to the revolution. They would buy workers lunch and give them money to attend demonstrations in favor of Khomeini: Come and make it look good.”
A second dinner on Thursday drew a crowd of university students and professors — one day after a planned dinner at Columbia got scrapped.
Among them was Russian-born Albert Bininachvili, a visiting political-science professor at Columbia who served as a captain in the Soviet war in Afghanistan and worked in the Soviet Embassy in Tehran during the hostage crisis of 1979.
He and other guests walked away with silver goodie bags filled with handmade plates and religious books.
Some also got “Documents of Iran’s Occupation by the Allies During World War II,” a politically inspired work that demands the United States and Britain pay millions more in war reparations.
Behind the scenes, his cronies kept busy creeping out other guests at the Warwick, where his entourage took a row of rooms on the 18th floor.
Four of them, middle-age men each looking similar to Ahmadinejad in cheap suits and open-collar shirts, followed guests, trailing them from a couch in the lobby to their rooms or getting in their faces to ask what language they spoke.
Of one baffled African visitor, they demanded, “Senor, do you speak French?”