A conversation about fraud
by digby
Bill Moyers and Bill Black talk about prosecuting mortgage fraud:
BILL MOYERS: Yet Eric Holder didn’t bring one criminal case against any executives in charge of the banks’ lending. You’ve called this the greatest strategic failure in the history of the Department of Justice.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yeah, in baseball terms they’re batting 0.000. But they’re not just batting 0.000, they took called strikes. They never got the bat off their shoulder and even swung. They didn’t even try.
BILL MOYERS: Do you remember when President Obama told “60 Minutes,” I think it was late December of 2011 that, “Some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street…wasn’t illegal?”
WILLIAM K. BLACK: I do.
BILL MOYERS: What did you think?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: I thought that he was wrong. That in fact if he listened to what the United States of America has demonstrated in court and through investigations, the activity was clearly illegal, it was a violation of a whole series of laws that make it felonies.
And these are just the frauds that caused the crisis. In addition to the frauds that caused the crisis, which are massive and we could talk about, we have the largest cartel in world history. This was the bid rigging of Libor, which is an international standard that sets the prices on over $300 trillion in contracts.
A trillion is a thousand billion, right? And then we have the foreclosure frauds where we have false affidavits. Over 100,000 felonies in that context. And then we have the bid rigging on bond prices where all the major banks, according to the Justice Department, were involved.
And then we had the Federal Housing Finance Administration, a federal agency suing virtually every largest, of the largest 20 banks in the United States of America, saying they defrauded Fannie and Freddie through false sales. And it goes on and on.
The savings and loan debacle, we made over 30,000 criminal referrals. Here, zero criminal referrals as far as we can get any public information. So the first thing Holder should’ve done is reestablish the criminal referral process. Because, you know, banks don’t make criminal referrals against their own CEOs.
BILL MOYERS: Do you tell yourself, well, there is a justifiable and understandable reason why they don’t prosecute?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: No, there is no justifiable reason. Apparently modern financial regulators are vastly more sophisticated than we were as financial regulators 25 years ago. Because we had never figured out that the key to financial stability was leaving felons in charge of the largest financial institutions in the world.
Well, in their defense the Department of Justice was very busy prosecuting the real bad guys. Just yesterday they bagged a big one:
“Real Housewives of New Jersey” stars Teresa and Giuseppe “Joe” Giudice faced a harsh dose of unscripted reality Thursday at a federal courthouse in Newark, New Jersey.
The New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s office tweeted that Joe Giudice received a sentence of 41 months in prison while his wife was sentenced to 15 months. The couple had earlier pleaded guilty to multiple federal fraud charges.
In addition to the prison terms, Judge Salas sentenced each to two years of supervised release, and ordered the couple to forfeit $414,588. Additionally, the judge fined Giuseppe $10,000 and Teresa $8,000
It brought to a close a case that had been pending against the pair who reportedly lived lavishly and were accused of various offenses including conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and lying on mortgage and loan applications.
Officials said the jail terms will be staggered to make sure that the Giudice’s four daughters will be taken care of. Teresa will surrender first, beginning her sentence January 5, and once she has returned from prison her husband will report.
They lived lavishly while they were lying on mortgage documents. Imagine that.
The judge showed no mercy:
Upon sentencing Teresa Giudice, the judge said she considered probation “for a moment” but then determined the fraud “merits incarceration.”
Although she believed the reality TV star showed “genuine remorse,” she added, “my gut tells me Teresa Giudice deserves to be in jail.”[…]
“Your four daughters need to understand discipline. If you don’t have it you shouldn’t spend it,” she said. “If they won’t like you because you’re not driving a Benz or walking on Jimmy Choos or Manolo Blahniks then they’re not your friends.”
The real problem is that they weren’t doing God’s work.
Update: Great minds and all that. Here’s Dday with the full indictment in the New Republic.