Apropos Sold by Clare Bronfman for $650,000

Apropos at sunset - and sunset has fallen on NXIVM too.

The world of Nxivm is disappearing before our very eyes.

The Nxivm clubhouse – named Apropos – on 1475 Route 9 in Halfmoon NY – used for years by Nxivm as a nearby gathering place for meetings – was sold for $650,000 to the owner of a nearby liquor store.

The Apropos location was minutes from where Keith Raniere and many of his followers lived in Knox Woods.

Nxivm’s main teaching facility in Colonie was a good 15-20 minutes drive away.

Clare Bronfman, the current leader of Nxivm, and its longtime director of operations, signed the deed filed Wednesday in the Saratoga County clerk’s office.

She sold the property to Michael R. Klimkewicz [MRK Real Property LLC.] Klimkewicz owns Halfmoon Wine & Liquor which is in the Crescent Commons retail plaza right next to Apropos on Route 9. Fred the Butcher, a popular local meat market is in between them..

 

Klimkewicz told BizJournals that he might plan to develop the Apropos property saying that “the location and traffic counts are ideal …. as a restaurant or to redevelop…  into a bank, fast-food restaurant or other use.”

The building is 6,000 square feet and sits on a 1.5 acre site with a parking lot.

“If you walk into the place, you’ll see it’s all up to code,” Klimkewicz told Bizjournals. “They did a good job maintaining the building. The exterior needs some work.”

Nxivm bought the property in 2006 for $650,000 which means that despite owning it for 13 years, they did not get a dime more than they paid for it.

However, when Nxivm [with Bronfman money] bought the vacant building – it had formerly been an Italian restaurant named Romanos – it required substantial work.

It is estimated that Nxivm [Bronfman mony] spent several hundred thousand dollars remodeling the property and bringing it up to code.

A controversy arose back when they first purchased the property when the planning board of Half Moon did not want to approve having the secretive group move in to teach.

Nxivm officials assured the town planning board that they would only use the property as a café and clubhouse and that there would be no conference rooms or training.

Of course, they lied and Nxivm has used the property for years for classes and training.

There was a private café [not open to the public] called Apropos. There, Nxivm members could go and pay for high-priced,low-calorie vegetarian food and meet with coaches and other Nxivm members.

Klimkewicz is not known to have any association with Nxivm and is not believed to have taken any courses,

First National Bank of Scotia loaned him $350,000 for the purchase.

He told Bizjournals, “I own the land around it. It makes sense and it fits into my portfolio.”

Klimkewicz also said he sees no reason why Nxivm’s prior ownership would deter someone from leasing or redeveloping the site.

As far as is known, there were no brandings that took place on the property.

India Oxenberg and Allison Mack leave Apropos after a Jness class held there.

 

 

NY Times magazine contributor Vanessa Grigoriadis and Sara Bronfman leave Apropos after a Jness training. Grigoriadis was the first media person in some 14 years to have access to the cult.

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Frank Parlato

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THAT Bob
THAT Bob
4 years ago

If I recall, those photos of Mack and others were originally taken by John Tighe and published in his blog. They likely recognized him in his little sports car and hence the angry faces.

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[…] Apropos Sold by Clare Bronfman for $650,000 […]

Anonymous
Anonymous
4 years ago

The images are small and blurry. Intentionally?

Anonymous
Anonymous
4 years ago
Reply to  Anonymous

Get an eye test.

Heidi
Heidi
4 years ago

The Romano’s, prior owners for decades, are our first cousins. Gina and Keith rendezvoused there often and always always got comped if our Mom wasn’t around picking up the tab.

Good to see it’s out of the wrong hands, finally.

Glad Clare didn’t profit from it and had to sell short.

As our Mom said all the time, “How apropos.”

shadowstate1958
4 years ago
Reply to  Heidi

Heidi:
Maybe the building will need an exorcism after the last twelve years of Satanic activity there.

Everybody must get Stone
Everybody must get Stone
4 years ago
Reply to  Heidi

Your mom approved of their rendezvous? Interesting.
Most parents would not approve of a situation like that.

Smells like a Flower
Smells like a Flower
4 years ago

That comment has the cloying scent of Flowers all over it. Why troll Heidi?

Everybody must get Stone
Everybody must get Stone
4 years ago

Liars should be trolled.
Especially liars who involve themselves with criminals.

State Your Case Petals
State Your Case Petals
4 years ago

Are you trying to be clever with these cryptic little comments, Flowers? State your case and let it be known.

Flowers
Flowers
4 years ago

I don’t have a case to state. There are always comments written under various new names, why assume they are all mine?

AnonyMaker
AnonyMaker
4 years ago
Reply to  Heidi

Heidi, interesting to hear about the prior owners.

Did your Romanos have other restaurants before that?

And are you then related to the Romanos who are longtime owners of the The Fountain Restaurant, as well?

Girl Scout Cookies
Girl Scout Cookies
4 years ago
Reply to  Heidi

Thank you Heidi!

1000words
1000words
4 years ago

For me that picture says everything, about the cult of nxivm. A disquieting image. Beware all who enter here, take care.

Anonymous
Anonymous
4 years ago

It’s so amazing how you sugar coated this article, let’s get to the truth, this was a place we’re they groomed and trained victims/volunteers how to traffick woman for sexual abuse.

Seriously, this place should of been demolished, where evil exist, evil will remain. Residual energy. Sicking.

hashtagvegangoals
hashtagvegangoals
4 years ago

Apropos the nest of vegan vipers to Fred The Butchers..

shadowstate1958
4 years ago

There is no hiding the fact that Allison Pimp Mack is afraid, very afraid in those photos.

For once she is not acting.

Anonymous
Anonymous
4 years ago

It is true shadow, you can see the fear in allison she was surely thinking, “it will be that shadow subject that they have talked to me so much, maybe you are planning to kidnap me and then torture me or just taking pictures for your album of photos of me.”

shadowstate1958
4 years ago
Reply to  Anonymous

The photo was probably taken by the Frank Report and the FBI was already investigating Allison Mack.

If you don’t doubt that even the stupid vacuus Allison Mack was starting to realize that the jig was up look at this photo of Mack taken in the summer of 2017 where Mack is on a balcony staring into space with a worried look on her face.
Posted July 29, 2017
https://www.instagram.com/p/BXI1wtSlBAH/

Anonymous
Anonymous
4 years ago

I remember Village Diane taking the pictures.

shadowstate1958
4 years ago
Reply to  Anonymous

And Village Diane was working with Frank Parlato to try to rescue India Oxenberg from the clutches of Allison Mack and NXIVM.

Shivani33
Shivani33
4 years ago

Fear shows itself in ways that are covered over by the predominant and conscious thought processing going on in the person, who often, and usually, doesn’t identify the inner “turmoil” as fear. There is not any such recognition allowable. The manipulation of someone’s fearfulness doesn’t include showing the controlled person that he or she is being mentally, emotionally, psychologically controlled. Of course you are not going to be let in on this.

You are not supposed to see or feel that things are really and definitively not okay. The sucker has to demonstrate how workable he or she is. There needs to be manipulatable weaknesses, needinesses to exploit, unawarenesses to play upon, without the “sucker” catching on to the methods used to assert control. This is how abusiveness works to disguise itself.

Raniere, as well as Nancy Salzman, pretended to be the gurus of a new path, cult and dogma with laws of how to be, how to think, how to behave, how to prove yourself, over and over again. You have to show that you are imprisonable, but this is warped into making you think that you have to prove that you are worthy of more immersion, that you are special.

You are worthy of the leader’s attention one moment. The cult minions will all salivate with approval, enthusiasm and hidden jealousy. The very next second, you can be made to feel that you are not doing well enough. Then the leader withholds approval, and the leader’s conditioned cult group will go right along with this “disapproval.” It is a constant jockeying, up and down, up and down, chaotically. People can live in a state of great tension, over whether they are good enough or not. The already unsteadfast psychological balance within can be smashed to smithereens, but this will be defined as part of what you MUST experience. This is crucial to understand.

Allison didn’t know what was happening to her. No one got it, or each one would have left. You can only be caught unawares! Only unawarenesses, personal frailties, dependencies are required to become involved at all in the first place. Once you get hooked, you must conform and perform or you will be rejected, abandoned.

The senses of unworthiness and the fears of abandonment, or rejection, expulsion are played upon like a violin. No one of good conscience would do this garbagemto another, but this is how cons work. You are so special to be part of it. But you are not good enough yet! And the trick is that you will never be worthy, regardless of what you give or how long and hard you can be made to keep trying, struggling, proving yourself.

A person who simply wants to grow, to meditate, to enjoy being with friends, but who is able to think things over independently and privately, is unlikely to be caught in the web of crushing and deceptive “interdependence.” The person who is able to sustain independent thought is too difficult to be trap into the ongoing shitshow, which depends upon the ‘”disciple’s” willingness to believe the constant games, of comparison to others, to possibly being rejected or shamed, no matter how one tries to conform. It will NEVER be good enough. That is a huge part of the entire entrapment. The entire word salad, the whole social dynamic, has to be swallowed ingested. Then the leaders have you where they really want you, in the first place. Drip by drip, step by step.

Raniere had the radar to figure out how to deceive and who could be deceived. This very radar was/is built of his own desperation and need to dominate, and to rule sadistically. Yet he knew that he had to giftwrap his intentions, to conceal his own chaos, his intentions to do harm, to be supreme. His sexual habits alone would be a gigantic stop sign to many, many people.

This sexual illness is not so much a debatable topic, vis-a-vis morality versus immorality, as it is an overt manifestation of Raniere’s own pathology. He had to trick people into thinking it was something else, something “spiritually advanced”, innovative, original and necessary.

Allison and others were influenced to think their cult immersion was something precious, with secrets which had to be protected. I pick up how fully Allison was immersed in the delusions of cult “brainwashing.” For me this shows in her posture, her facial expression. To my perception, her cult immersion permeates her through and through. She bought the glitter of the bullshit being delivered as required conditioning; cult inculcation is deliberately designed to make her, or anyone who enters into it, unable to think outside of Raniere’s, or any cult dictator’s, totalitarian CAGE.

She bought that he could cure her neediness, her sense of combined unworthiness plus her imbalanced inferioritt/ superiority scale.specialness. Whereas actually what she shows, and consistently, is how easy it was to use her and abuse her and to force her to believe this madness was the greatest experience of her life and had become her mission, her sense of selfless. She had to keep following or she would ruin it all, be rejected and become, again and again the object of censure. It is a battle the cult manipulators use constantly.

It start out that you aremgreat and should join in and you’ll become even greater, stronger and most crucially, alone no more, as long as you obey the rules, rules that you don’t know much of anything much about at first. First you have to be seduced into membership. Then the real shit can be implememted.

Longterm inculcation into cult madness plays heavily upon two essential components. The first is to play upon the person’s (easily identifiable) securities and insecurities. This can be called measuring and the controlling a person’s inner sense of worthiness and UNworthiness. The second is the underlying threat of rejection, abandonment, exclusion from the “preciousness” of being included into such a cult’s membership.

Comprehension of this manipulation is likely to spring open the trapdoor. Therefore, the followers must not be given any such opportunity to comprehend the overall structure or its motivations or goals, intentions.

The one who is the mark, the sucker, is caught up in this deliverance of outer and inner tension. “Am I good enough? Will I ever be good enough ? What can I do to deserve more praise and less blame? How can I prove my worthiness? OMG, what if I get kicked out?” And concurrently, the same insecurities, the same unworthinesses are turned into a feeding source for how special the sucker, the mark, is and will become. You get to earn that hallucinated specialness if you behave.

Yet you will never be “good” enough. In fact, the leaders view the whole process contemptuously.

So here, emerging from a cult-warp meeting, I see Mack’s egoic and fabricated self-identity “structure” permeating her every cell and gather many more specific impressions about how far immersed she was, as well as how it was affecting her. As mentioned, Allison would not have understood this consciously. She was already too wrapped up in it.

Maybe she is still. It depends upon what she is thinking, feeling now and how or if she has been able to begin to detach herself from her years of ongoing and encouraged cult dogma and its suppression of her own individuality and conscience.

Here in two photos, Mack has assumed the posture of the head guard dog, as I see it. Her slave must appear subservient. Mack must appear as the knowing and the hearty Special One. There is suspiciousness boiling under her devoutness. She has become a rottweiler, unawares.

There is her belief showing (to me) as a patina of self-righteous SEPARATENESS. ” I represent the cult now. I am Keith’s bishop.” I see how this sense of being special, being in on something which ordinary people can’t know, are not “spiritual” enough to understand had subsumed her.

The cult leader has to engender this illusion of specialness, of having a mission greater than anything ordinary, and of the need to guard the delusionary wonderfulness of it all, even to brand people, to become criminal in behavior, to allow ugliness to feel beautiful and unique, to become addicted to the darkness of falsities.

And if you don’t represent Raniere’s demands well enough, you will be in more and more trouble. No one can win at this game, because your willingness to be dominated, to be controlled is the game’s entire intention. And keeping the game going is the whole goal. The purported “spiritual” or self-help ideals are the very fabric of the lies and deceptions. There is a world of difference between “belief” and experience, but a cult doesn’t want anybody to know that. This is how they get somebody stuck along with them.

Words to say this, what I’m trying to express, aren’t easy for me to gather or to try to deliver with coherence or satisfactory comprehensiveness. I have the personal inner and outer experience, but perhaps the wording is not being put together that well by me.

Charles in charge.
Charles in charge.
4 years ago

The Seagram’s lady could have done anything she wanted in life and she chose to do these stupid things. Why?

Anonymous
Anonymous
4 years ago

She was drawn in at a younger age and brainwashed into this shit by asshole Keith. Promises of making the world a better place… later she was corrupted and arrogant and blind to her wrong doing. That’s why.

Scott Johnson
4 years ago

Another great Bronfman financial move.

Niceguy
Niceguy
4 years ago

Re Upstate New York real estate pricess

A 6000ft commercial property with and additional 1.5 acres goes for $650,000? WTF is Halfmoon like Turkestan or Flint, Michigan or did Clare sell it for a steal to the liquor store owner?

Clare is such a f*cking moron.

She probably just thinks “it cost next to nothing what do I care?”

She doesn’t understand that it’s thinking like that, that caused the Woolworth’s heiress to die almost penniless…… and many other heirs to fortunes….

And at the rate Clare and Sara are going they will be broke at about 60……

Girl Scout Cookies
Girl Scout Cookies
4 years ago
Reply to  Niceguy

good point.

Shivani33
Shivani33
4 years ago

These are such fantastic photos and great to get to linger over, soak it all in from over a thousand miles away, not having seen the atmosphere before in person.

It’s quite obvious how consciously trained to be aware of any cameras Ms. Mack is, or was when these photos at Apropos were taken. It really does to become like an automatic sixth sense, to feel the eye of the camera, from her profession.

But she squinches her eyes while focused on where the camera is, and she does so in two photos, her mask off, so to speak, as if she were aware that she had a lot to hide, at that time and moment. She looks a bit squeamish and hostile, admixed

One can see the fear seeping out of her, but I don’t think that she recognized it as fear back then. She looks, instead, suspicious and self-righteous. Her slave just looks enslaved, oozing that body language.

The other night watching a video with Mack talking about J-ness, there was a surprise for me. Having never heard anyone pronounce J-ness out loud before that moment, the way that it was being pronounced was for me, a direct perception of the use of what can be described as
linguistic double entendre.

In my mind, reading the word “J-ness” came out pronounced as “Jay-ness.” However, Mack and whoever else was using the term can be heard saying “Jeunesse.” To me that’s the French word for girlhood, youthfulness, even childhood itself.

Just wow to predators latching on to that innocence. What a word to distort. I don’t like to feel like crying. But wow.

shadowstate1958
4 years ago
Reply to  Shivani33

News just announced yesterday.
India Oxenberg is engaged to be married.
I suppose that Allison Mack will have to find herself a new slave.
Instead of being the top this time Allison will have to be the bottom.

Anonymous
Anonymous
4 years ago
Reply to  Shivani33

It is actually much more interesting than Jeunesse, it is a Multi-level Marketing company, dedicated to the sale of cosmetic products that operates in several countries, it is also a word that arises as an abbreviation of proper names in twitter accounts, so it is very fascinating to confuse it with anything else, it is curious that many of the groups that Keith I think have names similar to words of common use on the Internet seem a very deliberate attempt to make their names look familiar when pronouncing them, again you can see that Keith does not make anything original.

Niceguy
Niceguy
4 years ago
Reply to  Shivani33

Shivani,

Are you from North Hampton, Massachusetts?

shadowstate1958
4 years ago

Let’s look at the ledger for the last several years:

Losses
14 million dollars for the legal trust fund for co-defendants.

5 million dollars for lawyers for Vanguard Keith Raniere.

6 million dollars for restitution for identity theft conviction.

Legal fees to defend Clare Bronfman herself. (The sky’s the limit.)

50 million dollars for past litigation to harass NXIVM’s real and perceived enemies.

On the plus side:

650,000 dollars for one used restaurant building in fair shape.

NXIVM was an expensive hobby.
Anyone want to buy a used cult?

Scott Johnson
4 years ago

A real ledger would include buying the building several years ago for the same price and the cost of upgrades/code compliance.

shadowstate1958
4 years ago
Reply to  Scott Johnson

Scott,
The point is that the Apropos building was another bone headed investment by the Bronfmans.

ionwhitepoetry
4 years ago

Fitting end. Finally. It’s over.

shadowstate1958
4 years ago

So Allison Mack knew or sensed that someone was watching her.
comment image

Or maybe Allison was just getting a little paranoid.

Scott Johnson
4 years ago

That was nothing compared to your daily verbal beatings. Good thing she was banned from being on the internets. LOL

shadowstate1958
4 years ago
Reply to  Scott Johnson

Scott, who calls it “the internets” other than George W. Bush?

And while we’re on the subject, Nicki Clyne, through one of her numerous pseudonyms, indicates that she knows Allison Mack is accessing the internet.

“Angelina Cortez
October 9, 2019 at 11:31 pm
Allison, we forgive you. But you broke our hearts when you repudiated Keith. I know you are reading this.”
https://frankreport.com/2019/10/09/how-long-will-allison-mack-go-to-prison-2/

Anonymous
Anonymous
4 years ago

Scott, who calls it “the internets” other than George W. Bush?
Scott Johnson aka George W. Bush?

Scott Johnson
4 years ago

Me.

I’m glad Mack is accessing the internets.

Do you really believe Clyne tells the truth?

Anonymous
Anonymous
4 years ago
Reply to  Scott Johnson

There is an official/published truth and there is an unofficial/private/concealed truth. What is the truth has to wait.

About the Author

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist.

His work has been cited in hundreds of news outlets, like The New York Times, The Daily Mail, VICE News, CBS News, Fox News, New York Post, New York Daily News, Oxygen, Rolling Stone, People Magazine, The Sun, The Times of London, CBS Inside Edition, among many others in all five continents.

His work to expose and take down NXIVM is featured in books like “Captive” by Catherine Oxenberg, “Scarred” by Sarah Edmonson, “The Program” by Toni Natalie, and “NXIVM. La Secta Que Sedujo al Poder en México” by Juan Alberto Vasquez.

Parlato has been prominently featured on HBO’s docuseries “The Vow” and was the lead investigator and coordinating producer for Investigation Discovery’s “The Lost Women of NXIVM.” Parlato was also credited in the Starz docuseries "Seduced" for saving 'slave' women from being branded and escaping the sex-slave cult known as DOS.

Additionally, Parlato’s coverage of the group OneTaste, starting in 2018, helped spark an FBI investigation, which led to indictments of two of its leaders in 2023.

Parlato appeared on the Nancy Grace Show, Beyond the Headlines with Gretchen Carlson, Dr. Oz, American Greed, Dateline NBC, and NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, where Parlato conducted the first-ever interview with Keith Raniere after his arrest. This was ironic, as many credit Parlato as one of the primary architects of his arrest and the cratering of the cult he founded.

Parlato is a consulting producer and appears in TNT's The Heiress and the Sex Cult, which premiered on May 22, 2022. Most recently, he consulted and appeared on Tubi's "Branded and Brainwashed: Inside NXIVM," which aired January, 2023.

IMDb — Frank Parlato

Contact Frank with tips or for help.
Phone / Text: (305) 783-7083
Email: frankreport76@gmail.com

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