While The Kid was still in college, working his summer job in the financial rackets, a mob connection with close matrimonial ties to his mother, who was a Saint, took him to one of the Gangland hangouts to meet their Crime Family Godfather.
The Westchester Country Club was not an unlikely place to be rubbing elbows with mobsters who’d grabbed all the money in the world that hadn’t been stuffed inside mattresses yet. Everywhere one looked, aging Presbyterians in knickers and these argyle sweater kind of thingies were putting and swinging and chipping with alarming inaccuracy. Most wore those same sporty caps his prep school classmates always put on whenever they drove The Kid around in their MG’s.
He loved those MG’s. Please don’t get mad at The Kid anybody.
When they found the Don, the Godfather was sitting in a golf cart waiting for the foursomes ahead to realize they wouldn't be teeing off quite as scheduled. He chatted with The Kid's mob connection, who turned out to be a Crime Family Lieutenant or something, then glanced over at The Kid. The Kid stared into the cold, dead eyes of a great white shark. It was easy to see why this guy made Don.
“Do you want to work for us when you graduate, young man?”
“No.”
The Don turned back to the Gangland Crime Lieutenant. “None of our lads do. Not mine, not Jack’s, nobody’s. They think we’re a bunch of crooks. All of them.”
By then the carts ahead had sort of piled into each other but off the trail, and the Godfather’s driver motored his toward the First Tee. The Kid didn’t have time to respond.
“Thank God for that,” his mob connection must’ve been thinking as The Kid watched the Gangland Crime Lieutenant rolling his eyes while the Don's cart bounced jauntily away.
It took fifty-one years and financial Armageddon to convince The Kid that he really ought to tell people about this conversation. The Kid's not the only one. Somewhere in this great big nation of ours there are others who got taught this stuff and couldn't believe their ears either. Others with The Kid's same underworld connections. Dozens anyway.
The wise guys inside these Wall Street Crime Families are crooks. All of them. The Godfather about said so himself.
August 30, 2010
August 23, 2010
Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Your grifter sweet-talks you into buying 1,000 shares of Deep 6, Inc., some East Coast organic waste disposal outfit, and moments later the shares appear in your Filch & Finagle online account. Simultaneously over in Abu Dhabi, Ragheed Waddah Shlemiel sells 1,000 shares of Deep 6 short through the same Wall Street Crime Family.
You ordered real shares. Ragheed doesn’t have any to sell you. He only created a paper entry promising to go get 1,000 Deep 6 for you from somebody else when he feels like it, or is forced to. How do mob bean counters turn no shares at all into real shares in your account on their books?
Well, kind of like Bernie Madoff did, only the Crime Families add a wrinkle. They key 1,000 shares into your account as if they’d really bought them for you, vintage Madoff fraud, and in the wrinkle, bean counters set up a bookkeeping scam to cover their caper as long as the mob keeps throwing enough money at Washington and them to stop regulatory hotshots from digging deep enough.
Here’s how their con snookers you.
First of all, Filch & Finagle steps in to buy 1,000 from Shlemiel and sell 1,000 to you, representing that they enter into each trade themselves. Even though you actually bought from Ragheed, the paperwork never recorded that transaction. Mob books show two distinctly separate trades, having nothing to do with one another. This is proprietary scamming at its finest, cloaking real transactions under a shroud of darkness, cluttering the paper trail with bathroom tissue this time.
"Hey, we sold you real shares," wise guys can now say, and would if the subject ever came up.
Secondly, your holdings are registered in Filch & Finagle’s name, not yours, part of a great big pool including all Deep 6 shares recorded anywhere on Filch & Finagle’s books. So you don’t really have any stock in your account, just Filch & Finagle’s promise to give you back some of theirs that they bought with your money if you ask them nicely.
That‘s why the Feds insure every customer’s account at one of the mob operations for up to $500 thousand. Should a Family go bust, its promises would burn in Hell with the lot of them.
All those Deep 6 shares, real and bogus, get mixed in together, creating a deceptive shell game. Ask the wise guys about any account, and they’ll claim that real shares are held there. The bogus must be somewhere else. “Huh? what? who? where? when? foggettaboutit,” is the Gangland explanation. “Maybe he borrowed ‘em from somebody,” is real close to the actual excuse our regulatory hotshots gave to the media one time, “or not. They forget to do whatever it is they usually do sometimes.”
Just don’t try to pick up all the shells at once, the SEC official could‘ve added. Like the carnival version, we’ll never figure out what’s really going on in the Wall Street shell game until somebody comes along and does that for us.
But Gangland racketeers bribe Washington to make everybody look at this scam the mob’s way. One shell at a time.
It’s as if the bogus transactions don’t exist. That’s the part you've gotta love. In fact, some shares don’t exist, but the shell game twists that reality into the perception that the transactions never took place. Your shares are in there with everybody else’s, so what are you complaining about? Don’t worry, be happy.
*Lyrics by Bobby McFerrin
You ordered real shares. Ragheed doesn’t have any to sell you. He only created a paper entry promising to go get 1,000 Deep 6 for you from somebody else when he feels like it, or is forced to. How do mob bean counters turn no shares at all into real shares in your account on their books?
Well, kind of like Bernie Madoff did, only the Crime Families add a wrinkle. They key 1,000 shares into your account as if they’d really bought them for you, vintage Madoff fraud, and in the wrinkle, bean counters set up a bookkeeping scam to cover their caper as long as the mob keeps throwing enough money at Washington and them to stop regulatory hotshots from digging deep enough.
Here’s how their con snookers you.
First of all, Filch & Finagle steps in to buy 1,000 from Shlemiel and sell 1,000 to you, representing that they enter into each trade themselves. Even though you actually bought from Ragheed, the paperwork never recorded that transaction. Mob books show two distinctly separate trades, having nothing to do with one another. This is proprietary scamming at its finest, cloaking real transactions under a shroud of darkness, cluttering the paper trail with bathroom tissue this time.
"Hey, we sold you real shares," wise guys can now say, and would if the subject ever came up.
Secondly, your holdings are registered in Filch & Finagle’s name, not yours, part of a great big pool including all Deep 6 shares recorded anywhere on Filch & Finagle’s books. So you don’t really have any stock in your account, just Filch & Finagle’s promise to give you back some of theirs that they bought with your money if you ask them nicely.
That‘s why the Feds insure every customer’s account at one of the mob operations for up to $500 thousand. Should a Family go bust, its promises would burn in Hell with the lot of them.
All those Deep 6 shares, real and bogus, get mixed in together, creating a deceptive shell game. Ask the wise guys about any account, and they’ll claim that real shares are held there. The bogus must be somewhere else. “Huh? what? who? where? when? foggettaboutit,” is the Gangland explanation. “Maybe he borrowed ‘em from somebody,” is real close to the actual excuse our regulatory hotshots gave to the media one time, “or not. They forget to do whatever it is they usually do sometimes.”
Just don’t try to pick up all the shells at once, the SEC official could‘ve added. Like the carnival version, we’ll never figure out what’s really going on in the Wall Street shell game until somebody comes along and does that for us.
But Gangland racketeers bribe Washington to make everybody look at this scam the mob’s way. One shell at a time.
It’s as if the bogus transactions don’t exist. That’s the part you've gotta love. In fact, some shares don’t exist, but the shell game twists that reality into the perception that the transactions never took place. Your shares are in there with everybody else’s, so what are you complaining about? Don’t worry, be happy.
Here’s a little song I wrote,
You may want to sing it note for note,
Don’t worry, Be happy,
In every life we have some trouble,
When you worry, you make it double,
Don’t worry, be happy,
Don’t worry, be happy now.
Oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo,
Don’t worry,
Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo,
Be happy,
Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo,
Don’t worry, be happy.*
*Lyrics by Bobby McFerrin
August 20, 2010
The Televanalyst
“Hi, I’m Shill Buckhustler, and welcome to Pump & Dump. How can I mess up your life tonight?
“Look, we’ve got to be honest with you folks this time. Even our sponsor noticed that all the stocks I pushed on the show last week got slammed, and everything I scared you into unloading shot up. That’s because my hedge fund posse was selling our buys a lot harder than they said they would, and some wise guy over at my old Crime Family bought way more of what we were making you toss out than I'd counted on.”
“Hey, stuff happens. Deal with it.”
“Because this week we’re going to do it all over again. You know how this works. Viewers call in with your scatterbrained money-losing ideas, and your televanalyst, me, Shill Buckhustler, pushes you into the other side of anything that real movers and shakers want to get done.
“Remember, whatever increases trading volume boosts mob profits, and you’re a great big national audience. Even I can’t believe the SEC lets me get away with this.
“So, forget last week, morons. As anyone who watches knows, that isn’t what usually happens around here. The lines are open. How can I mess up your life tonight?”
“Hi, Shill. This is Darren in Philadelphia.”
“Forget you, Philadelphia Darren. What lame-brained nonsense are we going to laugh at now? Bring it on.”
“What usually happens around here, Shill?”
“Hey, a good question for a change. Darren, when I tell you to buy, mob bosses who already own the shares jack quotes up in the aftermarket, sell into the sudden temporary demand, and keep on keeping on until the last one of you suckers is in, even if it takes days. Once you’re all aboard, balloon pops, quote collapses, and the racketeers reload again at prices way, way lower than where you got hoodwinked in.
“It’s called shorting against the box. “Shorting“ because we fleece the public real good and thugs eventually buy their shares back, and “against the box“ because this time racketeers actually own the shares they’re stiffing you with.
“Getting my home viewers out of a stock goes kind of the same way too, only backwards.
“Okay, who’s next? Hit me, somebody out there. How can I mess up your life tonight?”
“Amber, Mr. Buckhustler. I’m living in my Toyota Corolla.”
“What’ve you got for me, Toyota Amber?”
“Has anybody ever sued you over this falderal?
“Another great question. No, the courts hold that you’d have to be completely out of your mind to think that anything we say here could ever possibly work out, and they put crazy people in institutions in America, Toyota Amber. They don‘t hand them somebody’s hard-earned televanalyst money. Hey, is this a great country, or what? Next caller please.”
“This is Bobby living in his Hummer.”
“Lay one on me, Hummer Bobby.”
“BAC at 15, Shill. Bank of America.”
“Look, folks, I recommended BAC at 55, I recommended BAC at 50, I recommended BAC at 45, and I recommended BAC at 40. And when it really started plopping down the crapper, I recommended BAC at 35, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, and 5 too. That’s because my peeps were shorting the calamari out of the whole mark-to-market catastrophe all the way down to the bottom, and I couldn‘t betray the wise guys by letting you know about it.”
“And then you recommended we sell at 3.”
“Hey, Hummer Bobby, you’re a real fan of the show. We’re going to send Hummer Bobby a How Can I Mess up Your Life Tonight t-shirt. Send him a How Can I Mess up Your Life Tonight t-shirt, somebody.
“So what do I do with BAC at 15, Shill?”
“Didn’t you sell at 3 like I told you.”
“No, I still got it.”
“Give me the next caller. Jeeze, people, if you’re not going to work with me on these picks, go watch Seinfeld re-runs.”
“This is Debby sleeping in her El Dorado, Shill.”
“Forget you, El Dorado Debby. Shill Buckhustler in your face. Hit me with something I want to talk about.”
“BAC at 14, Shill.”
“Oh, come on.”
“BAC at 14 ½, Shill.”
“Who’s that?”
“Corvair Phil.”
“Civic Doris, Shill. BAC at 14 ¼.”
“Explorer Dudley. BAC at 14 ¾, Shill.”
“Blazer Sam, Shill. BAC at 13 ¾.”
“What’s going on here? Didn‘t anybody listen to me at 3? Come on, people, you can do this. They don‘t call it an idiot box for nothing.”
“Look, we’ve got to be honest with you folks this time. Even our sponsor noticed that all the stocks I pushed on the show last week got slammed, and everything I scared you into unloading shot up. That’s because my hedge fund posse was selling our buys a lot harder than they said they would, and some wise guy over at my old Crime Family bought way more of what we were making you toss out than I'd counted on.”
“Hey, stuff happens. Deal with it.”
“Because this week we’re going to do it all over again. You know how this works. Viewers call in with your scatterbrained money-losing ideas, and your televanalyst, me, Shill Buckhustler, pushes you into the other side of anything that real movers and shakers want to get done.
“Remember, whatever increases trading volume boosts mob profits, and you’re a great big national audience. Even I can’t believe the SEC lets me get away with this.
“So, forget last week, morons. As anyone who watches knows, that isn’t what usually happens around here. The lines are open. How can I mess up your life tonight?”
“Hi, Shill. This is Darren in Philadelphia.”
“Forget you, Philadelphia Darren. What lame-brained nonsense are we going to laugh at now? Bring it on.”
“What usually happens around here, Shill?”
“Hey, a good question for a change. Darren, when I tell you to buy, mob bosses who already own the shares jack quotes up in the aftermarket, sell into the sudden temporary demand, and keep on keeping on until the last one of you suckers is in, even if it takes days. Once you’re all aboard, balloon pops, quote collapses, and the racketeers reload again at prices way, way lower than where you got hoodwinked in.
“It’s called shorting against the box. “Shorting“ because we fleece the public real good and thugs eventually buy their shares back, and “against the box“ because this time racketeers actually own the shares they’re stiffing you with.
“Getting my home viewers out of a stock goes kind of the same way too, only backwards.
“Okay, who’s next? Hit me, somebody out there. How can I mess up your life tonight?”
“Amber, Mr. Buckhustler. I’m living in my Toyota Corolla.”
“What’ve you got for me, Toyota Amber?”
“Has anybody ever sued you over this falderal?
“Another great question. No, the courts hold that you’d have to be completely out of your mind to think that anything we say here could ever possibly work out, and they put crazy people in institutions in America, Toyota Amber. They don‘t hand them somebody’s hard-earned televanalyst money. Hey, is this a great country, or what? Next caller please.”
“This is Bobby living in his Hummer.”
“Lay one on me, Hummer Bobby.”
“BAC at 15, Shill. Bank of America.”
“Look, folks, I recommended BAC at 55, I recommended BAC at 50, I recommended BAC at 45, and I recommended BAC at 40. And when it really started plopping down the crapper, I recommended BAC at 35, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, and 5 too. That’s because my peeps were shorting the calamari out of the whole mark-to-market catastrophe all the way down to the bottom, and I couldn‘t betray the wise guys by letting you know about it.”
“And then you recommended we sell at 3.”
“Hey, Hummer Bobby, you’re a real fan of the show. We’re going to send Hummer Bobby a How Can I Mess up Your Life Tonight t-shirt. Send him a How Can I Mess up Your Life Tonight t-shirt, somebody.
“So what do I do with BAC at 15, Shill?”
“Didn’t you sell at 3 like I told you.”
“No, I still got it.”
“Give me the next caller. Jeeze, people, if you’re not going to work with me on these picks, go watch Seinfeld re-runs.”
“This is Debby sleeping in her El Dorado, Shill.”
“Forget you, El Dorado Debby. Shill Buckhustler in your face. Hit me with something I want to talk about.”
“BAC at 14, Shill.”
“Oh, come on.”
“BAC at 14 ½, Shill.”
“Who’s that?”
“Corvair Phil.”
“Civic Doris, Shill. BAC at 14 ¼.”
“Explorer Dudley. BAC at 14 ¾, Shill.”
“Blazer Sam, Shill. BAC at 13 ¾.”
“What’s going on here? Didn‘t anybody listen to me at 3? Come on, people, you can do this. They don‘t call it an idiot box for nothing.”
August 17, 2010
The Case for Capital Punishment
During a market crash, investors bullied by Gangland racketeers sometimes opt for suicide rather than live with overwhelming loss. In the aftermath of 2008/09, unemployed breadwinners with no connection to Wall Street whatsoever have followed that lead, putting their families under the gun. Single moms are snuffing out children’s lives. Still.
Yes, this heartbreaking end game is still playing out today.
Poverty and abject despair have spawned the worst kind of misery for tens of millions of blindsided victims in this nation alone, the number beyond comprehension worldwide.
Walk our streets anywhere you go, and contemplate the boarded-up homes. Banks own more residential property than homeowners in far too many towns.
So many children uprooted from their lives. Innocent children, happy lives.
Much that working stiffs managed to save up over entire careers has vanished through the collapsing equity in their homes while Government stooges betrayed our humanity bailing out Crime Families in The City of Broken Dreams.
We at The MacDougal Post are trying to pass along what we know about short-selling, root cause of the financial evil that befell these times, in ways that illuminate the wise guy’s dark nature, motive, and Government-granted opportunity to bully and defraud. We think our work can be done without bringing on tears.
Yet, sometimes that makes us feel foolish, shaming our blogger into getting real once in a while.
Short-selling kills. How many this go-around, we do not know. Clearly, these are serial offenders though, and they murder men, women, and children indiscriminately, and serial killers deserve a price on their heads. It’s time for offenses of this nature, crimes against savings or personal income, to be codified as such, and made punishable through harsh sentencing appropriate to the magnitude of all injuries suffered.
Surely, the kind of sentence triggered by massive mob short-selling should reflect that racket's full toll, including mental disorder, illness, poverty, homelessness, starvation, loss, and death. Our doom was their crime spree, a Gangland swindle, and now that those horrific months of ruination appear to be abating, someone in this country needs to start counting victims and taking names.
Turning our eyes away from all the stricken souls does not sit well with God.
Yes, this heartbreaking end game is still playing out today.
Poverty and abject despair have spawned the worst kind of misery for tens of millions of blindsided victims in this nation alone, the number beyond comprehension worldwide.
Walk our streets anywhere you go, and contemplate the boarded-up homes. Banks own more residential property than homeowners in far too many towns.
So many children uprooted from their lives. Innocent children, happy lives.
Much that working stiffs managed to save up over entire careers has vanished through the collapsing equity in their homes while Government stooges betrayed our humanity bailing out Crime Families in The City of Broken Dreams.
We at The MacDougal Post are trying to pass along what we know about short-selling, root cause of the financial evil that befell these times, in ways that illuminate the wise guy’s dark nature, motive, and Government-granted opportunity to bully and defraud. We think our work can be done without bringing on tears.
Yet, sometimes that makes us feel foolish, shaming our blogger into getting real once in a while.
Short-selling kills. How many this go-around, we do not know. Clearly, these are serial offenders though, and they murder men, women, and children indiscriminately, and serial killers deserve a price on their heads. It’s time for offenses of this nature, crimes against savings or personal income, to be codified as such, and made punishable through harsh sentencing appropriate to the magnitude of all injuries suffered.
Surely, the kind of sentence triggered by massive mob short-selling should reflect that racket's full toll, including mental disorder, illness, poverty, homelessness, starvation, loss, and death. Our doom was their crime spree, a Gangland swindle, and now that those horrific months of ruination appear to be abating, someone in this country needs to start counting victims and taking names.
Turning our eyes away from all the stricken souls does not sit well with God.
August 14, 2010
The New Welfare
The moneyless have special needs, and social workers haven’t figured that out yet.
Sidelined Asian-American day trader, Frat Boke, put it best. “We don’t need home. We got home. We don’t need soup. We got soup. What moneyless need is margin.”
“Margin?"
“No margin,” Frat explained, “no stocks.”
The cash balance in your Crime Family account is what you bring to the table. It‘s called margin if you tell their grifter to buy more stock than your wad can actually pay for. The 2008/09 market holocaust took Frat’s margin away, and now he doesn’t have any anymore.
“So why they send me homeless shelter?” the sidelined day trader questioned. “Just need somebody pay down margin calls.”
The sisters at Our Lady of the Descension had arranged for this meeting. They didn’t know what a margin call was, and wondered if anyone at The MacDougal Post could help figure out what in the world Frat Boke was talking about.
“I think Mr. Boke wants us to give him some money,” Mother Bereft guessed, eyes wide with wonder. People give the nuns money, and they give other people soup, is how it usually works.
“She no understand,” Frat understood.
We were sitting in the convent’s soup kitchen with maybe 300 of the recently disinvested, and nobody was eating their soup. Mother, a.k.a. Sister Superior, looked worried. The nuns had gone out and bought 300 brand new bowls in case that was it, and a bunch of those big round soup spoons instead of the kind that look like regular ones, only bigger.
Still, nobody was eating their soup.
Fruitful dialogue began, and the subject quickly turned to shelters. Sister Superior could start by finding them a moneyless shelter, Mr. Boke suggested. A tax-free moneyless shelter in the Cayman Islands maybe, or Lichtenstein. Offshore financing for sure, possibly through a foreign trust. It made sense to set things up right from the get-go.
“Do you have any idea what he’s talking about?” Mother Berift whispered. Illuminating exchanges developed. Eventually Mr. Boke came up with something else.
There were plenty of homeless shelters in the city. The moneyless could get tons of soup there. They could bring it all back to Mother Bereft.
The moneyless would give the nuns soup, and the nuns would give the moneyless margin. And go find somebody else to feed. Some people would be giving Mother Bereft money and she would be giving it to other people who were giving her soup so she could give completely different people soup, and the nuns didn‘t have to make any.
A bailout. Just like on TV. Mother Bereft hoped the economy turned up soon so that Mr. Boke and the pack of them could go find jobs and “just get the Hell out of my kitchen“, is how Sister Superior ended up couching it herself.
Sidelined Asian-American day trader, Frat Boke, put it best. “We don’t need home. We got home. We don’t need soup. We got soup. What moneyless need is margin.”
“Margin?"
“No margin,” Frat explained, “no stocks.”
The cash balance in your Crime Family account is what you bring to the table. It‘s called margin if you tell their grifter to buy more stock than your wad can actually pay for. The 2008/09 market holocaust took Frat’s margin away, and now he doesn’t have any anymore.
“So why they send me homeless shelter?” the sidelined day trader questioned. “Just need somebody pay down margin calls.”
The sisters at Our Lady of the Descension had arranged for this meeting. They didn’t know what a margin call was, and wondered if anyone at The MacDougal Post could help figure out what in the world Frat Boke was talking about.
“I think Mr. Boke wants us to give him some money,” Mother Bereft guessed, eyes wide with wonder. People give the nuns money, and they give other people soup, is how it usually works.
“She no understand,” Frat understood.
We were sitting in the convent’s soup kitchen with maybe 300 of the recently disinvested, and nobody was eating their soup. Mother, a.k.a. Sister Superior, looked worried. The nuns had gone out and bought 300 brand new bowls in case that was it, and a bunch of those big round soup spoons instead of the kind that look like regular ones, only bigger.
Still, nobody was eating their soup.
Fruitful dialogue began, and the subject quickly turned to shelters. Sister Superior could start by finding them a moneyless shelter, Mr. Boke suggested. A tax-free moneyless shelter in the Cayman Islands maybe, or Lichtenstein. Offshore financing for sure, possibly through a foreign trust. It made sense to set things up right from the get-go.
“Do you have any idea what he’s talking about?” Mother Berift whispered. Illuminating exchanges developed. Eventually Mr. Boke came up with something else.
There were plenty of homeless shelters in the city. The moneyless could get tons of soup there. They could bring it all back to Mother Bereft.
The moneyless would give the nuns soup, and the nuns would give the moneyless margin. And go find somebody else to feed. Some people would be giving Mother Bereft money and she would be giving it to other people who were giving her soup so she could give completely different people soup, and the nuns didn‘t have to make any.
A bailout. Just like on TV. Mother Bereft hoped the economy turned up soon so that Mr. Boke and the pack of them could go find jobs and “just get the Hell out of my kitchen“, is how Sister Superior ended up couching it herself.
August 11, 2010
The Kid's First Job
The cage at Filch & Finagle was a large, cramped enclosure partitioned on three sides with floor-to-ceiling steel bars. Deliveries were made over counters built under teller’s windows fabricated into the metalwork. Other job stations, maybe eight or ten in all, lined the inside perimeter. Several desks, pushed together at the center of the room, formed a single countertop, where the head cashier held court.
Locked inside, a dozen or so wise guys, edgy from working together in the same tight space for 30 years, stood around keeping an eye on one another. A cross between your typical casino count room and the prison yard at Leavenworth one incident before lockdown.
The kind of place where you don’t go around stealing anybody’s Danish.
“Hey, he stole my Danish!”
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
“Get your gats outa my face.” Click
CLICK CLAAAAAACK CLICK.
"All right. Here, take it back. Who eats cheese Danish anyway?"
It was the summer of 1959 and this was the kid’s first job. A mob connection with close matrimonial ties to his mother, who was a Saint, figured it’d be cheaper to hire his teenager for those particular three months than to maintain him during that date-specific span of time.
The kid spent his entire salary on peanuts and tall beverages that summer owing to the astrological confluence of the number of calendar years he’d spent in this dimension and the minimum legal drinking age in the State of New York.
The kid’s mob connection put him in charge of the Crime Family's inventory of shares sold short, to the amusement of all the wise guys in the Filch & Finagle cage.
A joke the kid didn’t get for the longest time.
The teller’s windows faced a corridor leading to the service elevator. Stock deliveries were made through one window, the busiest work station in the cage, bond deliveries through the one beside it. The certificates there were filed in bins, sorted alphabetically, and when new paper came in, it was added to the rest, that lot then tallied and proven against mob books. Runners, generally retired wise guys, made these deliveries lugging big black satchels around, dangling from one hand. The hand changed from time to time when the sachels got heavy.
Cage soldiers prepared deliveries from tickets sent over by the bean counters, sliding appropriate certificates into large manila envelopes, penciling transaction information onto lines pre-printed across the outside, front and back.
Filch & Finagle runners waited for outgoing envelopes on a bench beside the elevators. Runners from other Crime Families dropped by with incoming envelopes all the time. Lower Manhattan swarmed with these guys, scurrying along everywhere, satchels lurching to and fro. They crisscrossed through narrow streets, navigating directly at the building they were headed for, disdaining pedestrian crosswalks of any kind.
In cold weather the runners bundled up. On slushy days janitorial staffs all over New York were kept busy mopping down the mess they made of city floors. When the rains hit, not a one called in sick, and you had to marvel at the old timers for that.
“Job gives them something to do,“ the kid’s mob connection commented one time, but it was more than that. These wise guys loved Wall Street, and being part of the action sparked their lives. You could see it all over their faces when deliveries came in.
Deeper inside the cage, mobsters dealt with other aspects of back office work. Dividend collections, receiving and matching chits with tickets, processing checks, running books, and so forth. The one thing no one ever touched was money.
It was a paper world down there.
The kid was assigned to the stock transfer window, backing up Eric whenever deliveries bunched up. Sometimes it would get hectic, and Joe had to come in and help them out.
Half a century later he would still remember their names.
The kid inventoried stock certificates against accounting records all day long. After the bin came up from the vault in the morning, the kid inventoried, before the bin went back to the vault at night, the kid inventoried, when things got slow and he had nothing else to do, the kid inventoried, and when business was really, really busy, the kid inventoried hardest of all.
The kid inventoried stock certificates all summer long.
And there wasn’t any inventory of shares sold short. It didn’t exist, and that’s what the joke had been about. The kid’s mob connection putting him in charge of nothing. Nothing at all.
Crime Families sell play shares short. They’re fake shares. Phony. Bogus. Made up. Believe me, if the certificates existed, the kid would’ve found them back in 1959. He was in charge of that inventory, and he looked for it all summer long.
Shares sold short are accounting entries only. Bernie Madoff accounting entries. You can see the numbers on records in the bean counter’s room, and the kid made his mob connection show that part to him, but nothing got posted to anything where the kid worked. There, certificates of shares sold short were nowhere to be found. Nowhere. Nowhere inside the whole stupid Filch & Finagle cage.
Such certificates do not exist. Their inventory is a deception in a massive securities fraud.
Locked inside, a dozen or so wise guys, edgy from working together in the same tight space for 30 years, stood around keeping an eye on one another. A cross between your typical casino count room and the prison yard at Leavenworth one incident before lockdown.
The kind of place where you don’t go around stealing anybody’s Danish.
“Hey, he stole my Danish!”
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
“Get your gats outa my face.” Click
CLICK CLAAAAAACK CLICK.
"All right. Here, take it back. Who eats cheese Danish anyway?"
It was the summer of 1959 and this was the kid’s first job. A mob connection with close matrimonial ties to his mother, who was a Saint, figured it’d be cheaper to hire his teenager for those particular three months than to maintain him during that date-specific span of time.
The kid spent his entire salary on peanuts and tall beverages that summer owing to the astrological confluence of the number of calendar years he’d spent in this dimension and the minimum legal drinking age in the State of New York.
The kid’s mob connection put him in charge of the Crime Family's inventory of shares sold short, to the amusement of all the wise guys in the Filch & Finagle cage.
A joke the kid didn’t get for the longest time.
The teller’s windows faced a corridor leading to the service elevator. Stock deliveries were made through one window, the busiest work station in the cage, bond deliveries through the one beside it. The certificates there were filed in bins, sorted alphabetically, and when new paper came in, it was added to the rest, that lot then tallied and proven against mob books. Runners, generally retired wise guys, made these deliveries lugging big black satchels around, dangling from one hand. The hand changed from time to time when the sachels got heavy.
Cage soldiers prepared deliveries from tickets sent over by the bean counters, sliding appropriate certificates into large manila envelopes, penciling transaction information onto lines pre-printed across the outside, front and back.
Filch & Finagle runners waited for outgoing envelopes on a bench beside the elevators. Runners from other Crime Families dropped by with incoming envelopes all the time. Lower Manhattan swarmed with these guys, scurrying along everywhere, satchels lurching to and fro. They crisscrossed through narrow streets, navigating directly at the building they were headed for, disdaining pedestrian crosswalks of any kind.
In cold weather the runners bundled up. On slushy days janitorial staffs all over New York were kept busy mopping down the mess they made of city floors. When the rains hit, not a one called in sick, and you had to marvel at the old timers for that.
“Job gives them something to do,“ the kid’s mob connection commented one time, but it was more than that. These wise guys loved Wall Street, and being part of the action sparked their lives. You could see it all over their faces when deliveries came in.
Deeper inside the cage, mobsters dealt with other aspects of back office work. Dividend collections, receiving and matching chits with tickets, processing checks, running books, and so forth. The one thing no one ever touched was money.
It was a paper world down there.
The kid was assigned to the stock transfer window, backing up Eric whenever deliveries bunched up. Sometimes it would get hectic, and Joe had to come in and help them out.
Half a century later he would still remember their names.
The kid inventoried stock certificates against accounting records all day long. After the bin came up from the vault in the morning, the kid inventoried, before the bin went back to the vault at night, the kid inventoried, when things got slow and he had nothing else to do, the kid inventoried, and when business was really, really busy, the kid inventoried hardest of all.
The kid inventoried stock certificates all summer long.
And there wasn’t any inventory of shares sold short. It didn’t exist, and that’s what the joke had been about. The kid’s mob connection putting him in charge of nothing. Nothing at all.
Crime Families sell play shares short. They’re fake shares. Phony. Bogus. Made up. Believe me, if the certificates existed, the kid would’ve found them back in 1959. He was in charge of that inventory, and he looked for it all summer long.
Shares sold short are accounting entries only. Bernie Madoff accounting entries. You can see the numbers on records in the bean counter’s room, and the kid made his mob connection show that part to him, but nothing got posted to anything where the kid worked. There, certificates of shares sold short were nowhere to be found. Nowhere. Nowhere inside the whole stupid Filch & Finagle cage.
Such certificates do not exist. Their inventory is a deception in a massive securities fraud.
August 8, 2010
Greenback Mountain
Abdul-Kebab, whose very name means servant of fried meat, or as he is called in his native Churlish, Lukkadat Hegodda Dresson, is a man of many sides of his mouth, Prophet of Someone But We Sure Hope It’s Not God to his townspeople. He made village Imam after taking the written 31 times before Uncle Loopi ran for Moolah and graded the thing himself just to get the nudnik nephew out of the hovel.
During Bush’s free-market years, Kebab showed CEO’s where they could put their hands on all the money in the world, and the Churl followed that up with how to try and keep it for themselves. Astonishingly, this Apocalyptic Prophet then foretold what the magnates would actually do with every dollar there is. The Business Roundtable tried to hire the man of many sides of his mouth on the spot. Accommodating all the village Imam's 137 wives in 135 adjoining bedroom suites proved daunting, however, and the project got outsourced overseas.
Greenback Mountain is the largest pile of money in the world. Located in picturesque downtown Abu Dhabi, Abdul-Kebab Lukkadat Hegodda Dresson raised it entirely with U.S. surplus currency, trade-imbalanced singles mostly, though vacationers at any of the resort’s seven full-service, family-friendly hotels can find five-spots and an occasional sawbuck if the kids dive in and dig deep enough. Prophet of Someone But We Sure Hope It’s Not God considers the mountain operation his professional calling. All the man of many sides of his mouth has to do now, it has been revealed, is ride around on ski lifts until the end of days begins, or however one is supposed to phrase that.
In fresh powder conditions, nothing in life rivals a run down the resort’s heralded giant shalom course, or so I‘m told. Topping out at fifty-two hundred and eighty feet, Greenback’s surface boasts 96 inches of pack - genuine, recently-minted crumpled Federal Reserve Notes backed by the full faith and borrowing power of the United States Government and all the goods and services produced by our nation’s economy. During pre-construction, CEOs all across America signed up for a chalet somewhere on the slopes, anywhere, even if it meant settling for one of the Bunny Trail time-shares. You know, until something became available up top.
Ragheed Waddah Shlemiel runs the guest equity hedge fund here. Upscale Greenback Mountain provides all its lodgers with downside market protection during their stay, and Ragheed furnishes the racketeering pop to make that happen for them.
After a thrilling adventure out on the challenging runs, trails, jumps and half-pipes overhanging this scenic city, there’s nothing like an Abu Dhabi apres-ski briefing to cap that perfect day. Add the hedge fund option to Greenback’s standard exotic Middle East vacation package, and listen to your own personal proprietary trader outlining the day’s financial carnage, a familiar touch of psychosis underscoring the berserk range of xtreme native pleasures already offered at the resort's surprisingly competetive rates.
Follow it up with a complementary camel shoot, and you’ve just had yourself one whale of a day.
Whales get harpooned upon request, when available.
First thing every morning call, Ragheed checks the fund’s cash position, then phones co-conspirators in Mucus Poole-Knightly’s Market Assault Cabal. If resort guests drop enough personal wealth into the pot, these wise guys can trash an entire market sector in maybe three weeks. Less boodle, and the racketeers may find some industry to cripple for a few sessions. On a slow day, Cabal thugs would probably take out a small to medium-sized public company on one of the regional exchanges.
The afternoon Iceland toppled, it happened to be Kebab’s 50th wedding anniversary, and the resort was booked solid with relatives.
Short-selling is a piece of cake if you lie, sell the suckers fake shares, throw as much bogus paper at the market as you want, and happen to be sitting on a mountain of money while you’re doing it.
From his high-tech war room inside the weather station at the summit of Abu Dhabi’s self-collateralizing Greenback Mountain, Ragheed Waddah Shlemiel pretty much controlled the destiny of the civilized world and Iceland back in 2008/09. He did not let Organized Crime down, as we were soon to find out.
“Selling short, you kill,” the guest equity hedge fund manager explained to me after a scintillating day on Bunny Trail. “Everything and anything. Every living thing. We are Satan‘s army. All is destruction and death.”
“What the dickens are you talking about, Shlemiel?” I couldn’t help wondering.
“The shares short-sellers fabricate are not real.” Ragheed paused for a moment. “Are the short-sellers?” Another brief interval passed while I tried not to think about that one too hard. “How can we be real if the shares we spawn are deceptions? Mere bookkeeping entries.
“Yet, as can now be seen in all those smoldering embers,” the nut case chuckled, kind of shouting too, “BOOKKEEPING ENTRIES FROM HELL!”
“Huh?”
“Are we real sellers, or ……”
"Geeze, Ragheed. What are you then?”
"Oh, the demon-spawned shares pass into real hands all right, and, in time, from real hands too, but while we’re marching, while our army sells short, defrauding victims tricked into buying high under our Government-granted evil powers ……”
I was really getting sick of his stupid pauses. “You’re making this sound like you’re all…” I found myself pausing too.
“Like what?” he asked. “Like we’re …….”
“I can’t say it,” I tried not to say.
“Yes, you can,” the bad man insisted. “Like what? Like we’re ……………..“
“Freaking UNDEAD minions,” I heard myself finishing in this weird, trembling kind of hiss. “The … Army … of … the … Undead.”
“Satan’s Army.”
“You ARE Satan’s Army.”
“All is destruction and death.”
When sellers of real Bank of America shares wanted 52, Ragheed and Mucus Poole-Knightly's cabal of co-conspirators asked 51.95 for their demon-spawned ones. At 51, the cabal asked 50.90. At 50, 49.5, at 49, they wanted 48, and then things got really sick.
Satan’s Army started messing with buyers. Step up and bid 47 for 40,000 real, and the Undead minions dumped demon-spawn on you, and offered 400,000 more at 46. Ragheed and them threw so much phony-baloney at investors, quotes couldn’t go anywhere but down.
Down.
Down.
Down.
Down.
Down.
Somewhere in here, the lies came thick and fast. “Toxic paper”, “broken business model”, “buy and hold is dead“ were all you heard on GE TV. “Codicil“, “codicil“, “codicil” and like that 24 hours a day.
“Mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-!&%$#&$ market”.
Buyers fled Wall Street in droves. Why put up real money for demon spawn? Why buy now when quotes will plunge as soon as your order gets filled? When stocks never stop freefalling and there’s no end in sight?
Sometimes Ragheed excused himself and stepped into to the john, and whatever the serial killer had been clubbing bounced right back up, but Waddah Shlemiel had excellent bladder control, and prices wouldn’t hold there for long.
Basically, mob minions pulled off Madoff accounting, but Madoff Accounting from Hell now, terrorizing the family of God in this unholy ritual Satanic bloodbath of theirs. Decent, honest, hard-working people like you and I found ourselves besieged with fear, buried in darkness, mired in conspiracy and fraud.
Pretend to sell what you never owned to somebody, then hammer prices down so you buy yourself out of the deception at prices way lower than you tricked the mark into paying. Paying for fake shares. And terrorize him in the dark, and bring Organized Crime along with you, and Washington too, and bring the Prince of Darkness and his minions, and terrorize the globe. Our poor, fragile planet.
That’s what pounded stocks into oblivion in 2008/09. Terrorism. The hearts and minds thing. Organized Wall Street Crime Families, enabled by bribed Federal stooges, took a people down with fraud, conspiracy, and psychological warfare. Drove our will to fight, to keep on keeping on, right into the ground. Did it with their own personal play shares, fraudulent entries in a phony set of accounts.
Co-conspirators in the Market Assault Cabal are terrorists. And they won. We ended up on our knees. Mucus, Ragheed and the lot defeated America in the 2008/09 Market Crash, and our Government helped these bloodsucking thieves. The officials you and I elected.
Washington politicians are the ones who’ve made Satan-spawned financial terrorism legal these many, many years.
During Bush’s free-market years, Kebab showed CEO’s where they could put their hands on all the money in the world, and the Churl followed that up with how to try and keep it for themselves. Astonishingly, this Apocalyptic Prophet then foretold what the magnates would actually do with every dollar there is. The Business Roundtable tried to hire the man of many sides of his mouth on the spot. Accommodating all the village Imam's 137 wives in 135 adjoining bedroom suites proved daunting, however, and the project got outsourced overseas.
Greenback Mountain is the largest pile of money in the world. Located in picturesque downtown Abu Dhabi, Abdul-Kebab Lukkadat Hegodda Dresson raised it entirely with U.S. surplus currency, trade-imbalanced singles mostly, though vacationers at any of the resort’s seven full-service, family-friendly hotels can find five-spots and an occasional sawbuck if the kids dive in and dig deep enough. Prophet of Someone But We Sure Hope It’s Not God considers the mountain operation his professional calling. All the man of many sides of his mouth has to do now, it has been revealed, is ride around on ski lifts until the end of days begins, or however one is supposed to phrase that.
In fresh powder conditions, nothing in life rivals a run down the resort’s heralded giant shalom course, or so I‘m told. Topping out at fifty-two hundred and eighty feet, Greenback’s surface boasts 96 inches of pack - genuine, recently-minted crumpled Federal Reserve Notes backed by the full faith and borrowing power of the United States Government and all the goods and services produced by our nation’s economy. During pre-construction, CEOs all across America signed up for a chalet somewhere on the slopes, anywhere, even if it meant settling for one of the Bunny Trail time-shares. You know, until something became available up top.
Ragheed Waddah Shlemiel runs the guest equity hedge fund here. Upscale Greenback Mountain provides all its lodgers with downside market protection during their stay, and Ragheed furnishes the racketeering pop to make that happen for them.
After a thrilling adventure out on the challenging runs, trails, jumps and half-pipes overhanging this scenic city, there’s nothing like an Abu Dhabi apres-ski briefing to cap that perfect day. Add the hedge fund option to Greenback’s standard exotic Middle East vacation package, and listen to your own personal proprietary trader outlining the day’s financial carnage, a familiar touch of psychosis underscoring the berserk range of xtreme native pleasures already offered at the resort's surprisingly competetive rates.
Follow it up with a complementary camel shoot, and you’ve just had yourself one whale of a day.
Whales get harpooned upon request, when available.
First thing every morning call, Ragheed checks the fund’s cash position, then phones co-conspirators in Mucus Poole-Knightly’s Market Assault Cabal. If resort guests drop enough personal wealth into the pot, these wise guys can trash an entire market sector in maybe three weeks. Less boodle, and the racketeers may find some industry to cripple for a few sessions. On a slow day, Cabal thugs would probably take out a small to medium-sized public company on one of the regional exchanges.
The afternoon Iceland toppled, it happened to be Kebab’s 50th wedding anniversary, and the resort was booked solid with relatives.
Short-selling is a piece of cake if you lie, sell the suckers fake shares, throw as much bogus paper at the market as you want, and happen to be sitting on a mountain of money while you’re doing it.
From his high-tech war room inside the weather station at the summit of Abu Dhabi’s self-collateralizing Greenback Mountain, Ragheed Waddah Shlemiel pretty much controlled the destiny of the civilized world and Iceland back in 2008/09. He did not let Organized Crime down, as we were soon to find out.
“Selling short, you kill,” the guest equity hedge fund manager explained to me after a scintillating day on Bunny Trail. “Everything and anything. Every living thing. We are Satan‘s army. All is destruction and death.”
“What the dickens are you talking about, Shlemiel?” I couldn’t help wondering.
“The shares short-sellers fabricate are not real.” Ragheed paused for a moment. “Are the short-sellers?” Another brief interval passed while I tried not to think about that one too hard. “How can we be real if the shares we spawn are deceptions? Mere bookkeeping entries.
“Yet, as can now be seen in all those smoldering embers,” the nut case chuckled, kind of shouting too, “BOOKKEEPING ENTRIES FROM HELL!”
“Huh?”
“Are we real sellers, or ……”
"Geeze, Ragheed. What are you then?”
"Oh, the demon-spawned shares pass into real hands all right, and, in time, from real hands too, but while we’re marching, while our army sells short, defrauding victims tricked into buying high under our Government-granted evil powers ……”
I was really getting sick of his stupid pauses. “You’re making this sound like you’re all…” I found myself pausing too.
“Like what?” he asked. “Like we’re …….”
“I can’t say it,” I tried not to say.
“Yes, you can,” the bad man insisted. “Like what? Like we’re ……………..“
“Freaking UNDEAD minions,” I heard myself finishing in this weird, trembling kind of hiss. “The … Army … of … the … Undead.”
“Satan’s Army.”
“You ARE Satan’s Army.”
“All is destruction and death.”
When sellers of real Bank of America shares wanted 52, Ragheed and Mucus Poole-Knightly's cabal of co-conspirators asked 51.95 for their demon-spawned ones. At 51, the cabal asked 50.90. At 50, 49.5, at 49, they wanted 48, and then things got really sick.
Satan’s Army started messing with buyers. Step up and bid 47 for 40,000 real, and the Undead minions dumped demon-spawn on you, and offered 400,000 more at 46. Ragheed and them threw so much phony-baloney at investors, quotes couldn’t go anywhere but down.
Down.
Down.
Down.
Down.
Down.
Somewhere in here, the lies came thick and fast. “Toxic paper”, “broken business model”, “buy and hold is dead“ were all you heard on GE TV. “Codicil“, “codicil“, “codicil” and like that 24 hours a day.
“Mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-market”, “mark-to-!&%$#&$ market”.
Buyers fled Wall Street in droves. Why put up real money for demon spawn? Why buy now when quotes will plunge as soon as your order gets filled? When stocks never stop freefalling and there’s no end in sight?
Sometimes Ragheed excused himself and stepped into to the john, and whatever the serial killer had been clubbing bounced right back up, but Waddah Shlemiel had excellent bladder control, and prices wouldn’t hold there for long.
Basically, mob minions pulled off Madoff accounting, but Madoff Accounting from Hell now, terrorizing the family of God in this unholy ritual Satanic bloodbath of theirs. Decent, honest, hard-working people like you and I found ourselves besieged with fear, buried in darkness, mired in conspiracy and fraud.
Pretend to sell what you never owned to somebody, then hammer prices down so you buy yourself out of the deception at prices way lower than you tricked the mark into paying. Paying for fake shares. And terrorize him in the dark, and bring Organized Crime along with you, and Washington too, and bring the Prince of Darkness and his minions, and terrorize the globe. Our poor, fragile planet.
That’s what pounded stocks into oblivion in 2008/09. Terrorism. The hearts and minds thing. Organized Wall Street Crime Families, enabled by bribed Federal stooges, took a people down with fraud, conspiracy, and psychological warfare. Drove our will to fight, to keep on keeping on, right into the ground. Did it with their own personal play shares, fraudulent entries in a phony set of accounts.
Co-conspirators in the Market Assault Cabal are terrorists. And they won. We ended up on our knees. Mucus, Ragheed and the lot defeated America in the 2008/09 Market Crash, and our Government helped these bloodsucking thieves. The officials you and I elected.
Washington politicians are the ones who’ve made Satan-spawned financial terrorism legal these many, many years.
August 5, 2010
The Sting
U.S. Ucker is, as we say in contemporary American literature, everyman. At the Filch & Finagle storefront in Minneapolis, his name appears prominently on the sucker list assigned to grifter Cash Draine.
Cash is a teller of tall tales. The tallest, I assure you.
U.S parked in front of the Crime Family storefront to see what Cash was doing while the mobster sweet-talked him over the phone.
Grifter had called Ucker’s home earlier with a pick and a price.
Readers, whenever your grifter calls, take heed. But if he’s got a stock pick and follows it with a price, hang up your telephonic device, and drive down to the storefront to stake his lying a$$ out. Park right out front, and call the big fibber back from there. It behooves you to watch through the storefront window and see exactly what sweet-lips is up to while he surmises the sting is going down.
On this one, the piece of calamari spin-doctor was doing a jig. In fact, all the wise guys were hoofing away. Inside the Minneapolis Filch & Finagle storefront, Riverdance had come to town. Champagne a spilling, legs a flying. Party balloons bounced gently along the ceiling as confetti scattered everywhere.
Across the office a wise gal hiked up her hem and boogied. She’d obviously closed some kind of deal moments before.
Atop a desk now, Cash raised both arms and started tapping his toes. From the other side of the storefront window, U.S. peered harder inside.
Now, from there, parked in a nice space directly across the street, one can see if gangsters are crossing names off a sucker list, and, readers, that’s precisely what U.S. Ucker was looking for. People like U.S. never get to experience the horror of a subbasement War Room under the City of Broken Dreams, nor sit in on a Crime Family conference call detailing a mob sting. But whatever’s going down, if the racketeers are working it from a sucker list, one thing is always sure.
They’re proprietary trading on you. All over you and yours. Proprietary trading all over your account, all over your nest egg, all over your financial plan, all over your golden years. They’re proprietary trading all over your future. And your future’s future too.
Crossing names off a sucker list is the tell.
There are only two sources of money on Wall Street. Yours and theirs, and when it’s making-yours-theirs time, remember, all this stuff starts in somebody’s subbasement War Room, and there are monsters down there. Throw your arms around yours, hold on tight, and keep it out of their thieving, bloodsucking hands.
From the driver’s seat of his Lexus, parked across the street from their Minneapolis Filch & Finagle storefront caper, U.S. Ucker could see racketeers crossing names off a sucker list. It was the tell, the great big fat, for-sure tell. He called Cash back with resolve.
The grifter picked up. “Hey, U.S.,” he crooned, “you in? I'm counting on you to drop a bundle.”
“Yes,” U.S. teased, and the grifter got a Charleston working, “I’ll think about buying some.” Wise guy stopped flopping his feet. He looked stunned. There was silence, and Cash jumped down from the desk, and started pacing the room.
“Maybe not, though.” U.S. wanted to see how Cash would react to that one. The grifter stopped moving, then dropped to his knees in prayer. “No. I’m not going to buy any. None of that at all.”
“I don’t like your pick,” U.S. added as the wise guy buried his face in his hands.
“And I don‘t like your price.” Cash fell forward, supine on the floor. The staff raced over to console him.
U.S. cranked the ignition, and dropped the Lexus into gear. He turned away from the curb and pulled into a break in traffic. U.S. smiled broadly. This was going to be a good month. He’d saved a bundle already. Happily, the former sucker headed home.
Bloodsucking thieves didn’t get him this time. Silently, U.S. thanked all his friends at The MacDougal Post. Without them, this would’ve turned out a lot differently.
U.S. vowed to keep reading on a regular basis. Whenever a new blog came out.
Everyman owes himself that much, U.S. knew.
Cash is a teller of tall tales. The tallest, I assure you.
U.S parked in front of the Crime Family storefront to see what Cash was doing while the mobster sweet-talked him over the phone.
Grifter had called Ucker’s home earlier with a pick and a price.
Readers, whenever your grifter calls, take heed. But if he’s got a stock pick and follows it with a price, hang up your telephonic device, and drive down to the storefront to stake his lying a$$ out. Park right out front, and call the big fibber back from there. It behooves you to watch through the storefront window and see exactly what sweet-lips is up to while he surmises the sting is going down.
On this one, the piece of calamari spin-doctor was doing a jig. In fact, all the wise guys were hoofing away. Inside the Minneapolis Filch & Finagle storefront, Riverdance had come to town. Champagne a spilling, legs a flying. Party balloons bounced gently along the ceiling as confetti scattered everywhere.
Across the office a wise gal hiked up her hem and boogied. She’d obviously closed some kind of deal moments before.
Atop a desk now, Cash raised both arms and started tapping his toes. From the other side of the storefront window, U.S. peered harder inside.
Now, from there, parked in a nice space directly across the street, one can see if gangsters are crossing names off a sucker list, and, readers, that’s precisely what U.S. Ucker was looking for. People like U.S. never get to experience the horror of a subbasement War Room under the City of Broken Dreams, nor sit in on a Crime Family conference call detailing a mob sting. But whatever’s going down, if the racketeers are working it from a sucker list, one thing is always sure.
They’re proprietary trading on you. All over you and yours. Proprietary trading all over your account, all over your nest egg, all over your financial plan, all over your golden years. They’re proprietary trading all over your future. And your future’s future too.
Crossing names off a sucker list is the tell.
There are only two sources of money on Wall Street. Yours and theirs, and when it’s making-yours-theirs time, remember, all this stuff starts in somebody’s subbasement War Room, and there are monsters down there. Throw your arms around yours, hold on tight, and keep it out of their thieving, bloodsucking hands.
From the driver’s seat of his Lexus, parked across the street from their Minneapolis Filch & Finagle storefront caper, U.S. Ucker could see racketeers crossing names off a sucker list. It was the tell, the great big fat, for-sure tell. He called Cash back with resolve.
The grifter picked up. “Hey, U.S.,” he crooned, “you in? I'm counting on you to drop a bundle.”
“Yes,” U.S. teased, and the grifter got a Charleston working, “I’ll think about buying some.” Wise guy stopped flopping his feet. He looked stunned. There was silence, and Cash jumped down from the desk, and started pacing the room.
“Maybe not, though.” U.S. wanted to see how Cash would react to that one. The grifter stopped moving, then dropped to his knees in prayer. “No. I’m not going to buy any. None of that at all.”
“I don’t like your pick,” U.S. added as the wise guy buried his face in his hands.
“And I don‘t like your price.” Cash fell forward, supine on the floor. The staff raced over to console him.
U.S. cranked the ignition, and dropped the Lexus into gear. He turned away from the curb and pulled into a break in traffic. U.S. smiled broadly. This was going to be a good month. He’d saved a bundle already. Happily, the former sucker headed home.
Bloodsucking thieves didn’t get him this time. Silently, U.S. thanked all his friends at The MacDougal Post. Without them, this would’ve turned out a lot differently.
U.S. vowed to keep reading on a regular basis. Whenever a new blog came out.
Everyman owes himself that much, U.S. knew.
August 2, 2010
SEC Complicity
Garner, Skimm, & Pilfer, wholesale house serving institutional funds managed by Garner’s dad, Skimm’s second cousin, and Pilfer’s brother-in-law, also has a big retail operation ripping off small investors like you and me. Typically, this kind of chop shop needs every little guy it can get.
With BAC selling around 15, a blood relative calls in his intention to cut portfolio losses by selling up to 10 million shares if the price drops to 13. In the world of Organized Crime, the word of a blood relative is his sacred bond.
Immediately thereafter, crew wise guys start short-selling into what is, in effect, a solemn oath, driving BAC down because a) they know their trades will be taken out by this guy as soon as they chop the quote to 13, b) regulatory hotshots at the Securities and Excuses Commission let them issue all the play shares they need, and c) chop shop Families have more money than Iceland.
Iceland among others, of course.
These short-sold shares are bogus. Totally fake. Play shares. At the same time this is going down, Garner, Skimm retail grifters start talking you and I into buying what we believe to be real BAC shares for all those small accounts of ours. But they aren’t real shares. Our tickets get crossed with chop shop short sales during the scam, and the mobsters don’t own any BAC to sell us.
To control firm risk, the Consigliore keeps watch over both amounts, fake shares shorted about equaling fake shares believed real all the time the scam goes on. Basically Garner, Skimm only shorts as much BAC as they’ve sweet-talked retail clients into thinking they’re buying.
At 13, the blood relative would sell his real shares. Ten million of them. To Garner, Skimm, of course. Family bean counters can finally replace shares believed to be real in our accounts with really real shares that just left the blood relative’s portfolio. The chop shop's own books show fake shares sold canceled out by shares faked as bought for the chop shop, probably the only transaction of its kind in the accounting profession that does not trigger a fraud investigation. Then, and only then, do the bogus shares sold short get purged from the marketplace.
If the mobsters get an average price of 14 for their shorts, the crew’s take would be $10 million. ((14-13) times 10 million shares).
However, the consigliore knows a good thing when he sees one. In actual practice, his racketeers will step in somewhere above 13, and start buying themselves, covering their entire short position in-house, driving the price back up in the process, and then start scamming around that solemn oath all over again, keeping fake shares in retail accounts for months. The take will be less - if The Family only gets an average price of 13.5 on the buyback, Garner, Skimm nets $5 million ((14-13.5) times 10 million shares). But the wise guys more than make up that difference with volume.
Do it four times, and the total take grows to $20 million. Sixteen, and they're up to $80 million overall.
A consigliore can set up an entire BAC trading station around a single solemn oath, and in good times add a new trader to the crew just to handle the increased action. One blood relative announcing his intentions to the mob this way becomes a gold mine for organized crime.
One blood relative and a slew of small investors manipulated into covering proprietary trading positions taken by the Family.
Given that I witnessed this kind of racketeering back in the 1950's, as explained by a mob source with close matrimonial ties to my mother, who was a Saint, after he’d been observing such goings-on since about 1917, and organized criminal activity has only escalated since then, one must be excused for concluding that our hotshots at the Securities and Excuses Commission operate under the assumption, “what the hell, anything goes with these people,” or else they’d have broken up Gangland rackets generations ago.
And now the taxpayer has bailed the Families out.
Maybe that’s why the SEC keeps so many lawyers on the payroll. Clearly, agency staff has to be functioning with no ethics at all.
With BAC selling around 15, a blood relative calls in his intention to cut portfolio losses by selling up to 10 million shares if the price drops to 13. In the world of Organized Crime, the word of a blood relative is his sacred bond.
Immediately thereafter, crew wise guys start short-selling into what is, in effect, a solemn oath, driving BAC down because a) they know their trades will be taken out by this guy as soon as they chop the quote to 13, b) regulatory hotshots at the Securities and Excuses Commission let them issue all the play shares they need, and c) chop shop Families have more money than Iceland.
Iceland among others, of course.
These short-sold shares are bogus. Totally fake. Play shares. At the same time this is going down, Garner, Skimm retail grifters start talking you and I into buying what we believe to be real BAC shares for all those small accounts of ours. But they aren’t real shares. Our tickets get crossed with chop shop short sales during the scam, and the mobsters don’t own any BAC to sell us.
To control firm risk, the Consigliore keeps watch over both amounts, fake shares shorted about equaling fake shares believed real all the time the scam goes on. Basically Garner, Skimm only shorts as much BAC as they’ve sweet-talked retail clients into thinking they’re buying.
At 13, the blood relative would sell his real shares. Ten million of them. To Garner, Skimm, of course. Family bean counters can finally replace shares believed to be real in our accounts with really real shares that just left the blood relative’s portfolio. The chop shop's own books show fake shares sold canceled out by shares faked as bought for the chop shop, probably the only transaction of its kind in the accounting profession that does not trigger a fraud investigation. Then, and only then, do the bogus shares sold short get purged from the marketplace.
If the mobsters get an average price of 14 for their shorts, the crew’s take would be $10 million. ((14-13) times 10 million shares).
However, the consigliore knows a good thing when he sees one. In actual practice, his racketeers will step in somewhere above 13, and start buying themselves, covering their entire short position in-house, driving the price back up in the process, and then start scamming around that solemn oath all over again, keeping fake shares in retail accounts for months. The take will be less - if The Family only gets an average price of 13.5 on the buyback, Garner, Skimm nets $5 million ((14-13.5) times 10 million shares). But the wise guys more than make up that difference with volume.
Do it four times, and the total take grows to $20 million. Sixteen, and they're up to $80 million overall.
A consigliore can set up an entire BAC trading station around a single solemn oath, and in good times add a new trader to the crew just to handle the increased action. One blood relative announcing his intentions to the mob this way becomes a gold mine for organized crime.
One blood relative and a slew of small investors manipulated into covering proprietary trading positions taken by the Family.
Given that I witnessed this kind of racketeering back in the 1950's, as explained by a mob source with close matrimonial ties to my mother, who was a Saint, after he’d been observing such goings-on since about 1917, and organized criminal activity has only escalated since then, one must be excused for concluding that our hotshots at the Securities and Excuses Commission operate under the assumption, “what the hell, anything goes with these people,” or else they’d have broken up Gangland rackets generations ago.
And now the taxpayer has bailed the Families out.
Maybe that’s why the SEC keeps so many lawyers on the payroll. Clearly, agency staff has to be functioning with no ethics at all.
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