Probation officer gives office BJ to boot-camp teen
Top 5 White Collar Villains: Mark Hurd Lies, Cheats and Scores $30 Million Severance
Friday, August 13, 2010 at 9:00 am
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Wall Street -- where being a criminal is just part of business. For former Morgan Stanley brokers Julian Yzolov and Eric Butler that means keeping the $4.5 million bonuses both received when they signed on in September 2007 after an arbitrator sided with the brokers over the investment banking firm. (A big Bronx cheer for lack of accountability!)
That will go a long way in covering the up to $5 million fine each faces for fraudulently selling $1 billion in securities while working at Credit Suisse, immediately prior to joining Morgan Stanley (where they worked for less than a year before being indicted. Yeah Morgan Stanely HR Department!).
The dynamic duo told clients (in falsified emails) they had safe securities backed by federally guaranteed student loans when in fact they'd purchased securities of subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations (the infamous CDOs), and other generally worthless crap. It wasn't their money, what did they care? Other than they got half a million dollars in commissions.
Multiply this by the number of unprincipled brokers on Wall Street and -- viola! -- one giant global financial crisis.
For their crime, Butler received a five-year sentence and a fine of $5 million, as well as forfeiture of $500,000 -- though he's still free, pending his appeal. Tzolov, who testified against Butler after briefly fleeing the country last summer, is yet to be sentenced.
The lesson here is, If you're going to be a con man, just be sure it involves wearing a suit.
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Stealing people's money is one thing, but taking advantage of people's kindness, generosity and compassion somehow seems even more craven. That's presumably why Ashley Kirilow's case has attracted so much attention. The Burlington, Ontario 23-year-old lied about having terminal cancer, going so far as to pluck her eyelashes and shave her head and eyebrows to appear convincing.
The amount Kirilow raised for herself and a fake charity, Change for a Cure, totaled around $20,000, pocket change for your typical mortgage fraud grifter or Wall Street broker. But taking advantage of our sympathy strikes closer to home.
It was apparently her father who reported the fraud to the police in April, roughly 18 months after Kirilow began telling people she had cancer. (According to Kirilow, she had a benign tumor removed from her breast in 2008.)
Her father says she told him she'd done it to hurt her him and her mother, who had divorced when she was young. Though she also told a Toronto Star reporter she'd done it to be noticed. Her father says he's ashamed this is his child, and expressed the hope that she will pay for what she's done.
She faces up to two years in prison. Even more than the well-wishers whose trust she betrayed, you feel bad for the parents, whose embarrassment must be mortifying.
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How is it that those raising the biggest stink on issues are the ones emanating the foulest odor? Case in point, former Republican state lawmaker Chris Ortloff, who served for 20 years in the New York State Assembly, before then-governor George Pataki appointed him to a cushy $102,000/year job as a state parole commissioner.
Any idea what the tough-on-crime 61-year old will face from prison denizens when they discover he's a pedophile?
The oozing hypocritical hemorrhoid was sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison and a $50,000 fine for attempting to set up a motel playdate with a 11-year-old and her 12-year-old sister through the internet. He was arrested in a motel outside Plattsburgh, New York because the mother he thought he was talking to was actually an officer taking part in a police sting.
Ortloff blamed the internet, where he went to meet women, with fostering an addiction to child porn, but claims he's now cured.
While in the assembly he rose to the rank of assistant minority leader and was known for his calls for stronger criminal laws, particularly for crimes against children. After all, studies have shown that most criminals were abused as children. But given Ortloff's crime, that might not go over so well in the general population. Don't drop the soap!
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Crime is addictive like chocolate, and before you know it, you're a fat sack of shit. Such is the case of William Silvi, who was charged with mortgage fraud while awaiting trial for the murder of his father.
Between March 2005 and January 2008, the larcenous bastard engaged in a series of 11 cases of mortgage fraud. Generally, he connected buyers and sellers he knew, inflate the sales price of the property, then take a kickback from the seller afterwards.
The 43-year old Colorado Springs resident also submitted fraudulent documentation to financial institutions and commercial lenders of employment, assets, salary and rental income to secure bigger mortgages on the buyers' behalf .
When this hustle ran its course, Silvi apparently began looking for a new mark. In March 2008, he convinced his brother-in-law, Daniel Tunks, to kill his father, William Marcucci, in a murder made to look like a mob hit. Marcucci, according to authorities, was thought to be an associate of the Genovese crime family involved in gambling operations.
Silvi and Tunks lured the 64-year old Marcucci to a Bennigan's in New Jersey (a sad place to spend the last moments of your life). In the parking lot, Tunks shot him in the back of the head. The plan was for Silvi to collect $750,000 in life insurance policies he'd taken out on Marcucci. (He wasn't patient enough to let his dad's mob life to run its natural -- read, shortened -- course.) Silvi's trial begins next month.
Teach your children well, indeed.
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When most of us lie on our expense reports, pay our girlfriend for work she's never done, and then are slapped with a sexual harassment suit from said girlfriend, we're told not to let the door smack our ass on the way out.
But it's good to be the king, which means in the case of former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd, he can resign and collect a severance package of money and stock valued at around $30 million.
Hurd certainly has an eye for talent. He hired Jodie Fisher, a former Playboy model (featured in a 1980 photo shoot Girls of the Southwest Conference) and softcore actress (1996's Body of Influence II) for the type of work that hardly sounds like work at all.
Between 2007 and 2009, the 50-year old Fisher contracted with the marketing department to greet people and make introductions among executives at events for $5,000 a pop. (Finally a future for aging porn actresses!) She attended at least a dozen events, was flown to Asia and Europe, and paid even when, on one occasion, she didn't go. Maybe she did most of her work off-the-clock.
That's certainly the implication, buttressed by the fact that Hurd expensed his private dinners with Fisher. Details of Fisher's charge of sexual harassment are unavailable, though in a statement HP described them as being involved in a "close personal relationship." However, Fisher's lawyer, famed ex-mistresses litigator Gloria Allred, stressed there was "no affair and no intimate sexual relationship" between the two.
According to some reports, HP felt compelled to fire Hurd -- who was in the process of negotiating a $100 million contract -- for fear of the public relations hit they'd take from the sexual harassment suit. It's questionable whether it worked -- HP's stock price dropped 10 percent after last week's resignation.
In related "fish rots from the head" news, HP agreed to pay the government $50 million for filing false claims in a Department of Justice investigation into alleged kickbacks between HP, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Accenture on government technology contracts.
Apparently, big business took a page from the welfare queens, and has figured out how to bilk the government for more than $300/week. Sadly, you won't hear many politicians talking about companies like Hewlett-Packard when they complain about government fraud and waste. It's just not racist, I mean, racy, enough.
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