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The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What’s more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even “one dollar” just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.
via Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? | Rolling Stone Politics.
Filed under: Action Alert!, activism, Corporations, economy, grassroots democracy, News, politics, US Politics | Tagged: American International Group, Goldman Sachs, Joseph Cassano, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Rolling Stone, wall street | 2 Comments »
This case was small potatoes for the Westhampton Beach attorney, a mere four counts. The worst one is still to come: a 130-count indictment charging Guldi and a handful of others with $82 million in mortgage fraud that links S&M dominatrices in SoHo to real-estate hijinks in the Hamptons. The political ramifications of this upcoming trial could run deep, especially considering that the Suffolk County district attorney’s leading witness against Guldi, a convicted felon named Ethan Ellner, is a former housemate and a workout buddy of County Executive Steve Levy. Ellner has alleged that Levy, who was an usher at his wedding, solicited campaign contributions for county contracts.
