At The Daily Beast Allan Dodds Frank has supplied a valuable perspective on the Picower settlement – although you need to be alert to see it.
“Payday for Madoff Victims” (December 18 2010) first of all refutes Barbara Picower’s tendentious assertion:
“I want to underscore the fact that neither the Trustee nor the U.S. Attorney has charged him with any illegal conduct.”
Picower could not be charged for a simple reason — he conveniently died.
Asked about Picower’s role in Madoff’s scheme and whether the settlement cleared Picower’s name, U.S. Attorney Bharara said, “Mr. Picower passed away a year ago and so the question of whether he had a role—as a criminal matter—is now moot.” Bharara refused to say more…
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But Frank got the message:
What Bharara left to be said in court papers is this: The U.S. government can only force forfeiture in cases where they can tie the money to “specified unlawful activity or a conspiracy to commit such an offense.”
Of the $7.2 Billion surrendered, $2.2 billion is forfeit to the Fed.
Bharara said it…is the largest single forfeiture in U.S. history.
Any idea that Picower was just an innocent passer-by as $7.2 billion fell off the back of a truck was utterly shredded by the Trustee’s law suit against him, as recounted by Erin Arvedlund (pp. 236-7)
Finally, Picower even went so far as to ask for fake trades to be made in one of his accounts – dated back to before the account was even open… In April 2006, Picower opened a sixth account, Decision Inc #6, with a wire transfer of $125 million…
By the end of April…Picower’s account showed a value of $164 million – a gain of $39 million, or a return of more than 30 percent, in less than two weeks trading. The reason for this massive gain [was] fifty-seven purported purchases of securities between January 10 and January 24, 2006, almost three months before the account was opened or funded.
As the Trustee’s suit drily said (P21)
Defendants knew or should have known that the account that they opened in April could not legitimately have purchased securities in January
There is much more of this sort of thing in the complaint.
(Note: I have updated The Picower Madoff settlement: A $7.2 Billion Whitewash with the back-dating information.)
While Barbara Picowar’s misrepresentations and posturing are irritating, what is really outrageous are the claims by the Prosecutor and the Trustee that their settlement agreement is appropriate. As laid out in “Deal Recovers $7.2 Billion for Madoff Fraud Victims“ by Diana B. Henriques (Dealbook/nytimes.com December 17, 2010),
In the late 1990s, Mr. Picower’s personal brokerage accounts at Goldman were worth about $10 billion, according to two people with direct knowledge of the account…
An aggressive investor with an appetite for risk, Mr. Picower also borrowed heavily at Goldman to trade stocks, amplifying his profits. At one point, his Goldman accounts had more than $5 billion in margin loans against them, according to the people familiar with his account history.
Liquid risk capital is extremely precious on Wall Street. That is why investors in Hedge funds typically get 80% of the profits the manager generates. This settlement reportedly leaves the Picower interests with well over $3 Billion. Resources drawn from the Madoff accounts must have been an integral part in the process of accumulating this wealth. Yet not even any interest – let alone a reasonable share of the profit – is being collected. To add insult to injury, the Prosecutor and the Trustee are actually praising the Picowers – see the nauseating “Picower Madoff settlement a practical $7 billion deal” by Rhonda Swan (The Palm Beach Post, Monday Dec 20, 2010).
I agree with the astute analysis posted by LondoninNY on The Daily Beast comment thread
Jeffry Picower was an International Financial Racketeer and Barbara was his mob moll wife who simply cut the best deal she could to maintain her lifestyle…Ms. Picower insults the intelligence of any and all reasonable people in her effort to embellish the legacy of a man who absent his convenient death belongs alongside Bernie Madoff and his entire family in a federal penitentiary.
Madoff victims had better hope the Bankruptcy Judge, who next month has to approve this sweetheart deal, has some integrity.
I advise them not to hold their breath. As Kevin MacDonald and I said in “Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic?“:
Thoroughly investigated, the Madoff scandal has the potential to illuminate the economic and political prerogatives usurped in late 20th-century America by what can only be described as the new ruling class. That will not be allowed to happen.
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Take Stephen Schwartzman & Blackstone partners, how many perfectly healthy businesses have been wrecked and bled dry as a result of the deals done by that greasy Jew & his partners?
I have no idea how many of Schwartzman/Blackstone deals have ended up in Federal Bankruptcy court? Including after Schwartzman/Blackstone had fled the scene for their next crime. I’m sure someone with access to the right database could get the stats.
The fact is that these Jews like Schwartzman, Picower, Madoff etc. live in federal court, and they use the federal legal & bankruptcy system to their advantage. No Federal Judge, not even one pledged to do the right thing can or will because of the way the Jews & their gentile partners game the federal regulatory & legal system.
That’s the way it is.
I have been watching this closely.
The thing that strikes me as unusual about the Madoff affair is that anything at all is being done about it. It seems to me that we have some people who are actually trying their best to get something done about this kind of criminal activity. Usually it is just swept under the rug.
I was amazed that Madoff went to prison. I know it is a Country Club prison, but still, he actually had to go!! Usually if someone goes to jail it is a minor player that goes just to make it seem like someone was punished.
The way things seem to be done anymore, I am surprised Madoff hasn’t been pardoned yet. He could appeal it to the Supreme Court and they would surely consider it his Constitutional right to do this kind of business. Reparations you know. Redistributing the wealth. Besides it was mostly white gentiles that got robbed and as long as they make the Jews whole, it should be okay.
Madoff’s robbery was sort of a sideshow compared to the real crimes that were perpetrated on us. The bailout, TARP, the excessive spending, etc. They stole our money and sent it all over the world. It is gone and hardly anyone seems to understand what they have done.
People that I talk to keep saying that loans were made to people who couldn’t afford them because we are all greedy people. I am in real estate. I did not deal with that kind of transaction. I suggested that they save up a down payment and get a loan that they would be able to make the payments on when the rate adjusted. They would go somewhere else if they still wanted to get into that kind of situation.
I don’t need money badly enough to destroy poor people’s lives to get it. They just wanted to better themselves and they were being told that this was the way to do it by people who were trained and were supposed to know how these things worked. I could not stop what was happening to them, but I could and I did refuse to participate in doing it to them.
Adjustable rate mortgages and lowered requirements were mostly done to feed the derivatives games the Jews were playing. They needed the quantity of loans to be increased because they had created such a great demand for the derivatives. No one seems to mention that part of it much. Maybe it is just easier to blame the defenseless victims as usual.
They sold the derivatives all over the world and I figure that is why our money went all over the world. They used it to bail themselves out and got to destroy us in the meantime.
I paid a lot of attention to BCCI and as far as I know, almost all of the criminals just walked away and started up again under new names.
Madoff’s son is dead by committing suicide with a “dog” collar. Now isn’t that interesting. I thought it was just a warning to any other “dogs” who might want to speak up. They like to send those kinds of messages. It is effective.
The best thing that I see happening is that when someone does try to stand up to them, at least we hear a little bit about it now because of the Internet. Before they just stood up, had their careers ruined or were killed and no one was the wiser and a “Madoff” would never have gone to jail.
When this type of thing is made as public as this one has been, then a lot of people realize that they really need to start paying attention to what is going on. They start realizing who is committing these crimes and helping each other cover them up.
The Shadow Government is coming into the sunlight and it is not a pretty sight.
I greatly respect the people who are standing up and putting everything on the line to try to put a stop to some of this. I don’t know if much can be done about it. I do know that if no one tries to do something about it, then we are guaranteed that it will never change.
Elizabeth, I think we are guaranteed that it will get much, much worse; absent a mass awakening by citizens to what has been and is being done to them by a variety of highly placed criminals.
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Because of corporate business forms like the “LLC” you can’t even find out who are all of the partners in a deal done by an investment capital firm like Blackstone. Or a major venture capital player like a Henry Hillman will set up a semi-opaque business form just to participate in a deal.
You could spend your waking hours going over “Edgar” filings and only have a very sketchy idea of the deals being done. It would take a battery of lawyers, cpa’s & reseachers just to raise the curtain on one deal.
As far as the real estate thing goes, when major banks started to advertise mortage, and other loans to illegal aliens, it didn’t take a genius to figure out something was very wrong!
History is Bunk, Ford tried to warn us. A lot of people have tried and some have even died for it. I am fairly certain that things are finally coming to a head and that there will be a huge price to pay for letting it go this far.
But hope springs eternal, and I hope that after that we can finally get our country back and clean up the mess.
Funny, when I wrote that I thought about the people of Louisiana not being allowed to clean up after the oil spill and the survivors of Katrina and Memphis and 911 and on and on.
They send our money all over the world and they won’t help us and they won’t let us help ourselves. They seem to work at prolonging the damage and pain rather than alleviating it.
But of course, they would.
Heck, a $7.2 billion, zero interest loan over 20 years invested only in a standard savings account paying 1% would leave you filthy rich! That’s $72 million a year!
There is a world apart from the bankruptcy proceedings under which Irving Picard operates. Does Eric Holder know anything about the forfeiture provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act {RICO}. To date there is no evidence that he does. Lucky Picowers. They are getting the Philadelphia voter intimidation treatment. Isn’t it great to not be a White Christian in America?