Bayou Management, the collapsed Connecticut hedge-fund firm, never made a profit despite years of sunny reports to clients, and it mostly stopped trading securities in mid-2004 as its founders tried desperately to recoup losses with fanciful bets totaling $150 million -- all that was left of the $450 million it had collected from investors, authorities said.
Those details emerged as Bayou Management's two founders, Samuel Israel III and Daniel Marino pleaded guilty in federal court in White Plains, N.Y., yesterday to criminal-fraud charges.
[...]
Both were released on a $500,000 bond. Mr. Marino faces as much as 50 years in prison, while Mr. Israel faces as much as 30 years. Sentencing was set for Jan. 9.
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The investigation was aided by a six-page "suicide note and confession" found on Mr. Marino's desk by a Bayou investor last month that provided a year-by-year account of the fraud and implicated both Messrs. Israel and Marquez, Stamford police say.
The scandal, which also has prompted civil lawsuits by investors, has raised questions about the investment advisers who steered clients' money toward Bayou.
How "independent" were those advisers? What about E. Lee Hennessee, a North Carolina Republican and yet another fervent Bush supporter who supposedly "vetted" Bayou for investors who invested tens of millions into the fraudulent fund? Shouldn't she, and the fees she took for such criminally negligent advice, be a part of this grand scheme of larceny?
Regular readers know that I harbor a special hatred for white-collar criminals. Their unique leverage over our lives, especially in a Shangri-La Ownership Society, makes them them deserving of extraordinary punishments and sentences that never seem to materialize. If a guy robs me at gunpoint for the fifty bucks in my wallet, he could go to jail for a substantial amount of time. But Ken Lay pumps up his worthless Enron stock, thereby decimating the life savings of thousands of employees and other shareholders in 401(k) and pension plans, and in over four years he has yet to go to trial.
I could get more excited about a death penalty if it involved the Lays, Marinos, Israels and Hennessees of the world. Not because they're Republicans, but because their actions are born of egomaniacal greed and are unquestionably evil.
Madison's Ray and Diane Maida say they were treated to an example of how President Bush just doesn't get it as the participated in the anti-war protest in Washington.
The Maidas, who lost their son, Mark, to a roadside bomb south of Baghdad last May, were standing outside the White House Monday morning when they saw a motorcade approach. The quickly donned T-shirts emblazoned with pictures of their dead son as an act of protest.
The president, spying the couple on the sidewalk from his limousine, smiled and waved.
"He was waving like a maniac," Ray Maida said. "He thought we were there to support him. He was clueless that we were there to show him the face of war."
[...]
"Nightline" is expected to air a segment on the Maida family in the near future.
As Forrest Gump would say, "Stupid is as stupid does." (Via Dan Froomkin at WaPo.)
"An act of blatant political partisanship" by "a rogue district attorney" and "a partisan zealot," Mr. DeLay said yesterday in a Capitol news conference, not long after announcing he would step aside temporarily as majority leader.
From hard experience, Mr. Earle was ready for that blast. In his own news conference in Austin shortly before Mr. DeLay's, Mr. Earle noted he has prosecuted 15 elected officials during his career, and 12 were Democrats. That reflects Democrats' long hold on power in Texas into the 1990s. Now, however, Texas Democrats don't hold a single statewide office.
As Mr. Earle put it yesterday, "We prosecute abuses of power, and you have to have power before you can abuse it."
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...as Texas switched to a Republican state under Gov. Bush, Mr. Earle's more recent prosecutions of Republicans have made the Democrat a target for partisan counterattacks. Previously, Mr. Earle was best known for his unsuccessful prosecution of Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, for alleged misuse of office and state employees when she was the state's treasurer before her election to the U.S. Senate. Like Mr. DeLay, Mrs. Hutchison dismissed Mr. Earle's indictment as partisan politics.
But Democrats remember the prosecutor's cases against some of their biggest names, including state attorney general and former congressman Jim Mattox, former Texas House Speaker Gib Lewis and former Supreme Court Justice Don Yarbrough. He also investigated former Comptroller and Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, the late Democratic mentor of Mr. Bush. The case against Mr. Mattox, like that against Mrs. Hutchison, didn't result in conviction. Yesterday, Mr. Earle was asked about his "mixed record." He said "only a couple" public-corruption cases weren't successful; they "just happened to be the high-profile" Mattox and Hutchison indictments.
It's impossible for Republicans to claim partisan zealotry when eighty percent of Earle's prosecutions were against Democrats. Now, of course, one hundred percent of his current prosecutions would necessarily involve Republicans because they hold one hundred percent of statewide offices in Texas.
Meanwhile, I assume Bullock is burning in hell for his misguided mentoring of Bush.
You could abort every rich Republican baby in this country, and your white-collar crime rate would plummet. (Not to mention, there would be no one left to enjoy the repeal of the so-called "death tax.")
Damn right-wingers — always confusing race with class.
Q: So many of Calvin and Hobbes strips had some kind of moral/theological element that I wonder what your religious upbringing was and if it influenced that. (For instance, the "Love the sinner, hate the sin" strip as well as many Santa-related Christmas strips.) I'm guessing you were raised Catholic?
A: Actually, I've never attended any church.
Bet that wasn't the answer you were expecting, Suzanne Kaufmann of Charlottesville, Virginia.
See the post below this one for more insight into the power of pro-religious prejudice.
