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
