While covering the initial FBI hedge fund raids, the New York Times added the following quote: “We have begun increasingly to rely, in white-collar cases, on undercover investigative techniques that have perhaps been more commonly associated with the investigation of organized and violent crime,” said Lanny A. Breuer, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s criminal division, in a speech this month.
What on earth are the requirements for financial crime to be considered organized by Justice? Or violent, for that matter.
Maybe it’s the collars.
Okay, Lanny and the boys are finally starting to sniff out those nefarious white collars, but what we’ve always had on Wall Street has been mostly striped collars, with some nice pastels and maybe a pink or two now and again. Yellow as well, and I feel I should apologize for that one even after all these years. So there’s really a pack of striped collars and like that on the loose, and it reads like we‘ll have to wait for Lanny Breuer’s crime busting Untouchables to catch up with them now.
Meanwhile back in the real world, one notes yet another Goldberg, Styx connection to a Federal sting, and remembers that their former CEO, while Treasury Secretary, threw Letterman Brothers under the bus at the same time Goldberg’s exposure to the toxic Wall Street bond underwriting apocalypse got covered under the table when AIG was bailed out. Could a Letterman informant be afoot in here somewhere seeking payback?
Furthermore, as we learned from our mob connection, a man with close matrimonial ties to our mother, who was a saint, Mob traders rip us off through 1) short selling, 2) mining our orders, and 3) concerted action, throwing the entire weight of all the Families into targeted securities and sustaining the attack until the public’s savings are looted in full.
Keep an eye peeled on how carefully Gangland stooges at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) avoid those three areas. Insider trading has long been used to draw attention away from the central rackets, turning up peripheral scapegoats with no direct connection to the Crime Lords themselves.
Policing any one of the three would lead to the other two and put an end to Wall Street racketeering forever, so look for that to happen never.
Lastly, using the yuppie term, “network”, to describe Gangland racketeering is a pathetic stab at sugar-coating organized financial crime, the kind of mob-serving touch our regulatory hotshots always add to show underworld observers whose side they’re really on. Wall Street grifters are yuppies, you see, not mobsters at all. Market crashes don’t mass-murder anybody, or psychologically cripple their immediate victims, or loot nations, or cause worldwide catastrophic economic devastation that lingers for decade after decade across generations of stricken families.
One only hopes that someday FBI agents will be raiding SEC offices as well.
