"I went up to his office when I heard about it, went over a lot crap with him and left, " Mike said with a cough and bit of gravel in his voice. "Naw. It didn't make no sense to me at all about how you can make so much money in such a short time. There had to be a catch. Not with my money because I didn't give him none. I figured you'd have a better chance laying up two bucks on a three-legged horse. Naw. I ain't no dummy."
Trouble today is that there aren't enough savvy courthouse horse players around to know that Bernard Madoff was shuffling all of his money from the bottom of his private deck. Interestingly, although it has been in vogue to blame the people being forced from their homes for not reading the fine print in their mortgages, there is almost no concern about the careless way so many huge money bags were offered up by people and institutions who might have been more careful about their treasures.
Corruption has become so widespread in the carpeted offices of the investment industry that the FBI in New York says it is diverting some of its agents from a terrorism watch to the fraud on Wall Street. "We have to work with those cases we think pose the greatest threat," the FBI's David Cardona told Bloomberg.com. "In this case it's the threat to the financial system and Wall Street." How comforting!
But how would the big losers know? It's true that the SEC would have been the last people to ask inasmuch as they (as well Alan Greenspan) were fully committed to George Bush's "ownership society" as well as ignoring lot of other signs of mischief on Wall Street. That now translates into easy come, easy go, particularly for millions of homeowners. As for the record-breaking Ponzi, there are scattered reports of some big companies that rejected Madoff's preposterous robust investment options. For all the others, it was too bad that Mike the bailiff wasn't around to advise the well-paid company financial advisors.
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