Allegedly criminal oligarch arrested:
But when the lawyer, Marc S. Dreier, stepped off a flight from Canada on Sunday night, federal authorities in New York arrested him in a $100 million fraud scheme, portraying his recent undertakings as more high-stakes grifting than high-end lawyering.
In brazen and carefully choreographed scams here and in Canada, Mr. Dreier, who in 1996 founded a 250-lawyer firm that bears his name, is said to have tried to take advantage of the current financial crisis by selling phony debt to hungry hedge funds looking for deals.
It’s quite the story if you click through, worthy of its own tee-vee drama if you ask me. Much more interesting than starlets exposing themselves.
There is bleating going on by the right about how we need efficiency in government. And you know, we do need efficiency in government. But we also need efficiency and accountability in the private sector. If someone can sell over $100 million in utterly fake and worthless notes to hedge funds, there’s not much accountability there. Basically Wall Street became home to a type of organized crime. Instead of burying bodies they buried the entire economy.
Time to dust off those RICO statutes and get even busier.
Jon, Jon, Jon….I guess you missed this News headline:
Ho, Hum…Another Democrat, another Criminal indictment. Nothing new under the sun here. Sounds like the U.S. Senator seat from Illinois was up for the highest bidder.
That story just broke nationally.
There is NO WAY a mere governor could equal the looting of the federal treasury done under the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress of 2001~2006. They took a balanced budget and in six short years turned it into a trillion-dollar annual deficit, tripling the national debt in the process, much of which went into the back pockets of the nation’s wealthiest individuals and politically reliable companies, either through unwise tax cuts (to be paid for by our grandchildren), or simply cash payments to companies on no-bid contracts. And the bleeding continues over the past two years (and on into the Obama administration) as the taxpayers are forced to pay for bailouts of of the banking, auto, and other industries who’s leaders got obscenely wealthy twice – once by ignoring all rules of fiscal responsibility while the Bush administration turned a blind eye to the coming train wreck caused by such actions, and again on the bailout money provided by the taxpayers.
The last eight years have proven that no war, natural disaster, or economic crisis exists which Republicans don’t feel entitled to milk to their own financial advantage, regardless of the harm it causes the rest of us.
“more interesting than starlets exposing themselves.”
Really, Mr. Devore? A little advice is in order here. If you have any inclination at all in maintaining a legitimate journalistic reputation, I’d suggest against using this type of over-blown hyperbole.
Yep, it’ll be boom time for prosecutors jailing all those white-collar criminals.
Seize those criminal assets baby! This country needs to pay off Republican folly.
1 is a bad sock puppet. I’d delete that.
@6 I second that motion.
When the law-and-order Republicans fired all the cops, the criminals held a festival in Main Street. So much for the wingnut theory that the best government is no government.