Senator Schumer Was Regular Visitor to Madoff Offices

[Octafish]

A new book explains how money brings Buy-Partisanship.



New Book: Senator Schumer Was Regular Visitor to Madoff Offices

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade, October 15, 2014

New York City has 8.4 million people living in its boroughs. But when it comes to defending those charged with financial crimes, it’s a very small, clubby world of people who are either related to each other or have worked together in the past. And this clubby group has one more thing in common: most of its members seem to be lavishing huge campaign contributions on U.S. Senator Charles (Chuck) Schumer of New York – a man who is in a position to recommend Federal Judge appointments and the Justice Department’s U.S. Attorney who will prosecute the financial crimes – or not.

These are the findings in a new on-line book, JPMadoff: The Unholy Alliance Between America’s Biggest Bank and America’s Biggest Crook, being offered free as a chapter a month by attorneys Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer. (Chaitman is a nationally recognized litigator who was swindled by Madoff and is passionate about getting an unabridged recital of facts out to the public, including details about the extensive involvement in the fraud by the big Wall Street bank, JPMorgan Chase, and Madoff clients that the authors believe to have been co-conspirators.)

Chapter 3 is now up on the web site and delivers this nugget: “Senator Schumer was a frequent visitor to Madoff in his office in New York’s Lipstick Building.” This information came to Chaitman in 2009 from Madoff employees and is confirmed by a 2014 interview with Madoff himself by Politico’s MJ Lee, indicating that Schumer paid personal visits to Madoff to collect campaign contributions.

In the March Politico article, Lee adds this: “Approached in a Senate hallway last week, Schumer seemed willing to talk to a reporter — until the subject of Madoff came up. ‘I’m not commenting,’ the New York Democrat said as he walked away. ‘I am not commenting.’ ”

CONTINUED...

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2014/10/new-book-senator-schumer-was-regular-visitor-to-madoff-offices/

During the Iran-Contra hearings, I'd hoped Schumer would run for president. Now, in exchange for his testimony, I hope he goes into Federal Witness Protection.

[derby378]

1. Rut-roh... (n/t)

[Octafish]

3. Kind of weird feeling, what I got, a twisted deja vu thing...

...like the floor dropped out from under the chair and I hovered over a now all-too familiar abyss.

Elephant in the room: Senator Charles E. Schumer calls the fraud "a punch in the gut" to the financial system and castigates the S.E.C. for its failure to uncover the scheme. He likens the actions to a giant elephant standing in a small room next to the S.E.C. for decades and "not only did they not see the elephant, they didn't even smell the peanuts on his breath," Mr. Schumer says.

SOURCE: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/pressclips/2009/01/sitting_target.php

Going from the smell of things, there are lots of creatures besides elephants that love peanuts.

[GoneFishin]

2. I am disappointed, but not surprised. Chuck's stock has dropped as of late. nt

[Octafish]

4. Reading that article gave me flashbacks to the Keating Five.

Schumer denies report he called SEC on Madoff probe

Politico, February 26, 2010

Sen. Charles Schumer is denying a published report that he called the Securities and Exchange Commission for details about the probe into Bernie Madoff's $65 billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

In his a book set to be released next week, "No One Would Listen," Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos passes along an unsourced claim that New York's senior senator, a powerhouse fundraiser with close ties to Wall Street, called the financial industry watchdog for the inside scoop. He maintains Schumer did nothing wrong.

"I was told, by a government agency, for example, that New York Senator Charles Schumer called the SEC at some point to inquire about the Madoff investigation," writes Markopolos, a fraud investigator who tracked Madoff in his spare time, according to book excerpts obtained by POLITICO.

"There is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing on Senator Schumer's part, zero, and no suggestion that he was intending to interfere... Senator Schumer apparently made a call on behalf of his constituents."

CONTINUED...

http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0210/Schumer_denies_report_he_called_SEC_on_Madoff_probe.html

Thanks for the heads-up, GoneFishin. Sen. Schumer had been among the party's rising stars.

[Jim Lane]

6. Huge difference. Schumer did nothing wrong.

The Madoff whistleblower says Schumer simply placed an inquiry, apparently on behalf of a constituent. Unlike the Keating Five, there's no evidence of interference.

If Madoff was a big donor, and suspicions of possible impropriety triggered an investigation, and Schumer had not asked what was up, people who want to bash him would now be denouncing his wilful disregard of problems with a big donor.

[Octafish]

8. Did Schumer help Madoff?

For some reason, Harry Markopolos, the Madoff whistleblower, got ignored by everybody in Washington.

Madoff Whistleblower Markopolos Blasts SEC

Analyst Harry Markopolos blames the SEC for not stopping Bernie Madoff sooner, but he praised new chairwoman Mary Schapiro

By Aaron Pressman
Business Week, June 5, 2009

Chartered financial analyst Harry Markopolos spent 10 years unsuccessfully trying to convince the Securities & Exchange Commission to investigate Bernie Madoff. Now that Madoff's $65 billion Ponzi scheme has been revealed as the biggest fraud in U.S. investing history, Markopolos is pushing for dramatic changes at the SEC, which oversees the brokerage and investment industries.

"The SEC was nonfunctional, captive to the industry," Markopolos told a dinner gathering of investment professionals at Boston College on June 4. "It was not going to take on anybody big or powerful."

SNIP...

Checking for Car Bombs

Markopolos first began looking into Madoff's investing record in 1999 when executives at his employer, Rampart Investment Management in Boston, asked him if the strategy could be duplicated. Markopolos says he became immediately suspicious because Madoff never reported losing money in any month. "I knew it was a fraud in about five minutes," he said. Further investigation showed that Madoff's claimed options trading exceeded by as much as 65 times the entire volume of the contracts he said he used.

While he failed to persuade regulators to investigate Madoff, Markopolos said he increasingly came to fear for his life. Though he had not received any threats from Madoff or any other parties, his nervousness reached the point where he was checking his car for bombs.

"If this gets out to Bernie Madoff, my life expectancy isn't very long," he said, explaining his state of mind at the time. "He'd have many billions of reasons why he doesn't want me around."

CONTINUED...

http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/jun2009/pi2009065_888396.htm

Personally, I suspect the Bush crime family and their cronies.

[Jim Lane]

24. No, he did not, at least according to Markopolos.

In the excerpt from Markopolos's book (via Politico and Octafish in #4), we read this from Markopolos:

"There is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing on Senator Schumer's part, zero, and no suggestion that he was intending to interfere... Senator Schumer apparently made a call on behalf of his constituents."

I completely agree with you that people should have listened to Markopolos. The way he was ignored was a scandal. AFAIK, however, Markopolos would have no reason to cover up for Schumer. If Markopolos says Schumer was clean in this, I believe him.

[progressoid]

5. Didn't he sign onto PNAC too?

[Octafish]

7. PNAC 2.0? The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD)

He was, then he wasn't -- from what I understand.

More Democrats Flee FDD

February 27th, 2008 | by Jim Lobe1

For an update on the exodus of Democrats from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, see Wednesday’s article by Spencer Ackerman on the new Washington Independent website and a later piece by Isikoff and Hosenball at the Newsweek website. It seems that three other Democrats, including Rep. Eliot Engel and Sen. Chuck Schumer (whom I didn’t mention in Tuesday’s post), have resigned from the group, which last week hastily reorganized its corporate structure — and gave birth to a new organization, Defense of Democracies — to preserve its 501(c)3 status.

Of course, these Democrats are leaving primarily because FDD has become increasingly partisan in its attacks on specific Democratic lawmakers and leadership, not because of its steady drumbeat of Arabo- and Islamo-phobia that has dominated its work since its inception more than six years ago. I still wonder whether the remaining self-described Democrats, such as former Amb. Marc Ginsberg and, most particularly, James Woolsey and Sen. Lieberman (that will be an interesting test), will also desert the FDD. And what about the Democrats associated with the Committee on the Present Danger, an FDD “project?” They include former Reps. Dave McCurdy and Stephen Solarz, and former Amb. Peter Rosenblatt.

May denied to Newsweek that the funding for the controversial ads came from telecom companies, insisted they came from individual donors. I would imagine that the likely suspects include the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) donors to Freedom’s Watch, which has set a goal of raising and spending $250 million this year in support of its agenda. The current ad campaign in support of Bush’s version of the Protect America Act costs $2 million, according to Newsweek.

SOURCE: http://www.lobelog.com/more-democrats-flee-fdd/

Regarding FDD: It's run by Adm. James Woolsey, BFEE Turd o' War.

PS: No offense to the admiral -- it's just politics. And business.

[KamaAina]

10. I thought the Foreign Policy Initiative was PNAC 2.0

http://www.foreignpolicyi.org/

Board of Directors
Eric Edelman
Robert Kagan
William Kristol
Dan Senor

[Octafish]

12. It's all BFEE to me.

Think Tanks for the War Party

The Powell Memo was the precipitating event for the swift rise and astounding success of big business and its control of the United States, starting in the early 1970s. The memo presented a bold strategy for how the corporate life form could take over the key portions of the system, without the other side knowing what was happening. Unless they have read the memo, they still don't...

...Those working for the common good have no equivalent of The Powell Memo. In other words, the opposition has a master plan and we don't.

SOURCE: http://www.thwink.org/sustain/articles/017_PowellMemo/

The Powell Memo was first published August 23, 1971.

[Aerows]

18. It is. n/t

[In_The_Wind]

9. I just want our money back. We still haven't recovered from being ponzied.

[Octafish]

14. Absolutely. $700 Billion? $8 Trillion? No one who knows has said how much for the record...

Secrets and Lies of the Bailout

The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come

By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone, January 4, 2013

EXCERPT...

THEY LIED TO PASS THE BAILOUT

Today what few remember about the bailouts is that we had to approve them. It wasn't like Paulson could just go out and unilaterally commit trillions of public dollars to rescue Goldman Sachs and Citigroup from their own stupidity and bad management (although the government ended up doing just that, later on). Much as with a declaration of war, a similarly extreme and expensive commitment of public resources, Paulson needed at least a film of congressional approval. And much like the Iraq War resolution, which was only secured after George W. Bush ludicrously warned that Saddam was planning to send drones to spray poison over New York City, the bailouts were pushed through Congress with a series of threats and promises that ranged from the merely ridiculous to the outright deceptive. At one meeting to discuss the original bailout bill – at 11 a.m. on September 18th, 2008 – Paulson actually told members of Congress that $5.5 trillion in wealth would disappear by 2 p.m. that day unless the government took immediate action, and that the world economy would collapse "within 24 hours."

To be fair, Paulson started out by trying to tell the truth in his own ham-headed, narcissistic way. His first TARP proposal was a three-page absurdity pulled straight from a Beavis and Butt-Head episode – it was basically Paulson saying, "Can you, like, give me some money?" Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, remembers a call with Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. "We need $700 billion," they told Brown, "and we need it in three days." What's more, the plan stipulated, Paulson could spend the money however he pleased, without review "by any court of law or any administrative agency."

The White House and leaders of both parties actually agreed to this preposterous document, but it died in the House when 95 Democrats lined up against it. For an all-too-rare moment during the Bush administration, something resembling sanity prevailed in Washington.

So Paulson came up with a more convincing lie. On paper, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was simple: Treasury would buy $700 billion of troubled mortgages from the banks and then modify them to help struggling homeowners. Section 109 of the act, in fact, specifically empowered the Treasury secretary to "facilitate loan modifications to prevent avoidable foreclosures." With that promise on the table, wary Democrats finally approved the bailout on October 3rd, 2008. "That provision," says Barofsky, "is what got the bill passed."

But within days of passage, the Fed and the Treasury unilaterally decided to abandon the planned purchase of toxic assets in favor of direct injections of billions in cash into companies like Goldman and Citigroup. Overnight, Section 109 was unceremoniously ditched, and what was pitched as a bailout of both banks and homeowners instantly became a bank-only operation – marking the first in a long series of moves in which bailout officials either casually ignored or openly defied their own promises with regard to TARP.

CONTINUED...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104

[stevenleser]

11. Why wouldn't he? No one thought Madoff was doing anything wrong. He hadn't even been accused of

anything. Madoff had friends all over NYC. He was a popular guy.

[Aerows]

15. I'm confused

If Madoff was doing nothing wrong, why was he sent to prison?

[stevenleser]

20. Why are you confused? How would anyone know someone would be charged of something in the future?

If it comes out in a year that you are masterminding a crime right now, should I be tainted for discoursing with you now?

[Oilwellian]

16. As posted above

the actual truth:

Chartered financial analyst Harry Markopolos spent 10 years unsuccessfully trying to convince the Securities & Exchange Commission to investigate Bernie Madoff. Now that Madoff's $65 billion Ponzi scheme has been revealed as the biggest fraud in U.S. investing history, Markopolos is pushing for dramatic changes at the SEC, which oversees the brokerage and investment industries.

"The SEC was nonfunctional, captive to the industry," Markopolos told a dinner gathering of investment professionals at Boston College on June 4. "It was not going to take on anybody big or powerful."

SNIP...

Checking for Car Bombs

Markopolos first began looking into Madoff's investing record in 1999 when executives at his employer, Rampart Investment Management in Boston, asked him if the strategy could be duplicated. Markopolos says he became immediately suspicious because Madoff never reported losing money in any month. "I knew it was a fraud in about five minutes," he said. Further investigation showed that Madoff's claimed options trading exceeded by as much as 65 times the entire volume of the contracts he said he used.

While he failed to persuade regulators to investigate Madoff, Markopolos said he increasingly came to fear for his life. Though he had not received any threats from Madoff or any other parties, his nervousness reached the point where he was checking his car for bombs.

"If this gets out to Bernie Madoff, my life expectancy isn't very long," he said, explaining his state of mind at the time. "He'd have many billions of reasons why he doesn't want me around."

CONTINUED...

http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/jun2009/pi2009065_888396.htm

[Octafish]

17. You must not have heard what Harry Markopolos said.

The guy first went to the SEC in 2000.

"No one would listen."

I can understand why he wasn't on FOX.

[stevenleser]

21. Markopolos was on Fox, here's the video

If you are going to raise that canard, you really ought to do a quick google search first. Silly ad-hominems are bad enough. Those that are easily proven wrong really make you look dumb.

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/4058828/markopolos-on-showdown-with-sec/#sp=show-clips

[Octafish]

22. Thanks for the link! No ad hominem from me, toward you, Madoff or Schumer.

FOX is another matter, run by the Nixon-Reagan stooge Roger Ailes.

So, why didn't the SEC do anything about Madoff?

[woo me with science]

13. K&R

[Octafish]

23. This is the sort of report that makes the past come alive - gives it a real green cast.

THE RECKONING

A Champion of Wall Street Reaps Benefits

“We are not going to rest until we change the rules, change the laws and make sure New York remains No. 1 for decades on into the future.”

— Senator Charles E. Schumer, referring to financial regulations, Jan. 22, 2007

By ERIC LIPTON and RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
The New York Times, December 13, 2008

EXCERPT...

“You need to provide safety and security to investors in order to attract them to the markets,” Mr. Schumer told Wall Street executives in a speech last month. “On the other hand, you must be sure that regulation does not snuff out the entrepreneurial vigor and financial innovation that drives economic growth and makes financial institutions successful and profitable.”

And he is seeking some regulatory concessions for some Wall Street supporters. He has proposed, for example, that the government lift a cap on how big the giant banks can get, an issue important to institutions like JPMorgan Chase. Lifting the cap would allow the biggest banks to absorb weaker ones, but it would also limit competition and increase the risks to the financial system posed by failure of one of the giants.

Mr. Schumer is also calling for the adoption of European-style regulations that impose far fewer rules and instead require banks to meet certain performance standards, a system institutions generally prefer but some banking experts criticize as not rigorous enough.

In recent weeks, Mr. Schumer has listened to Wall Street leaders for advice on what should come next. At a dinner at Morgan Stanley’s headquarters the night before the presidential election, John Mack, the chief executive, and a dozen top hedge fund officials talked with Mr. Schumer about possible changes affecting their industry.

“People feel like he is going to be fair and reasonable,” said one Morgan Stanley executive, who asked not to be identified because the session was private. “He is mindful that this is a very big part of his constituency — Wall Street.”

SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/business/14schumer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

19. "Senator: Person who makes laws in Washington when not doing time." Mark Twain

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."

"I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring in higher prices than any in the world."

"Senator: Person who makes laws in Washington when not doing time."

Mark Twain