Posts
since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Madsen mentions that longtime Madoff associate and booster Ezra Merkin recently acquired Bank Leumi, the National Bank of Israel.
While a bank is useful in a money-laundering scheme and Israel's general lack of financial transparency is really helpful, you really need businesses, whose profits are not so easily tied to its costs and whose revenue sources are cash or hard to trace.
Historically chains of pizzerias were used by the Sicilian Mafia, and then they found that laundramats were even better. In modern times, hi-tech and especially software firms seem to have been used -- especially startups because as the dirty money becomes clean it can be used to show the profitability necessary for a lucrative IPO.
A criminal conspiracy may actually make more money with a fraudulent IPO than with the original crimes. This type of leveraged money-laundering requires a respectable (we know what that means) (probably US) investment bank.
While a bank is useful in a money-laundering scheme and Israel's general lack of financial transparency is really helpful, you really need businesses, whose profits are not so easily tied to its costs and whose revenue sources are cash or hard to trace.
Historically chains of pizzerias were used by the Sicilian Mafia, and then they found that laundramats were even better. In modern times, hi-tech and especially software firms seem to have been used -- especially startups because as the dirty money becomes clean it can be used to show the profitability necessary for a lucrative IPO.
A criminal conspiracy may actually make more money with a fraudulent IPO than with the original crimes. This type of leveraged money-laundering requires a respectable (we know what that means) (probably US) investment bank.
I am not suggesting that Madsen is wrong, but he needs both to identify a few more elements to the scheme and also to investigate the role of "regulators," for the power of corrupt Jewish networking in securities regulation even astounded me in the case of Madoff because apparently no one ever tried to match even one vapor transaction by Madoff's hedge fund with any real transaction with any bank or brokerage firm.
In the lead-up to and fall-out from the 1873 and 1929 crashes a lot of the whistle-blowers were Jewish. I am not seeing much Jewish whistle-blowing in the current finance meltdown.
One correspondent suggests we need to expand the investigation to Madoff's other business and partners:
This helpful detail supplied by Jesse may help fill out the picture:
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2009/01/where-is-bernies-trade-book-who-were.html
This appears to be a brick in the wall of 'rogue trader' status. He could do it himself because he made no trades at all.
However this was not Bernie's only commercial operation in the securities business, in addition to his now nefarious private fund.
Primex was registered as Primex Holdings, L.L.C. in NYS in October of 1998. Primex is a joint venture involving a digital trading auction which operates out of Bernie's 18th floor office at 885 Third Ave.
Madoff's business partners in the Primex Exchange were Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lynch.
Did Bernie give any business to this joint venture? Did any of the above brokers have any investments or losses with the Madoff Fund? If not why not? It was one of the most successful funds, on paper, on the Street?
More questions than answers. Let's hope this one does not disappear down a black hole like the enormous put option positions placed on the airline stocks just prior to 9/11.
While it is a sort of distraction from the Primary Modern Fraud, the Madoff fraud appears to be one of the more interesting cases in forensic accounting even in comparison with the Enron collapse.
