So that story about Andrés Piedrahita, husband of Corina, son-in-law of Walter, and Fairfield Greenwich exec recently buying a $22 million boat and “cruising the Adriatic” with his wife and friends, appearing to not have a care in the world, while ripped off FFG investors get a crash course in dumpster diving? You got it all wrong! Here’s the deal, according to a lawyer for the the worst feeder fund on earth: Piedrahita had already ordered the yacht before the shit hit the fan, and couldn’t cancel it. Now, the only reason he’s on the thing, is because he’s showing it to prospective buyers. You can’t expect someone to plunk down 22 mill without going for a test drive, can you? Once someone makes an offer, Piedrahita will turn the money over to Irving Picard, who will distribute it to Madoff/Noel victims. To reiterate, for the Colombian’s reading, who want the guy dead: Andrés is not living it up. He cares about your problems, he cares deeply, and if one were a fly on the wall of the boat, it would not be typical around cocktail hour to see him handing his glass to Corina and going “watch this,” before doing the worm across the deck to the delight of all passengers. He is heartbroken over what’s happened, and in an emotional hole so deep there’s few things that could pull him out of it, save for some fresh investor cash or a couple lines of your people’s finest. Help him help you.
Archive for July 2009
T. Boone’s favorite piece of concrete was on the move again. The well-traveled section of driveway is back at its place of origin, Holdenville, OK as the fight for TBP’s signature heats up and is heading to the courts. On the one hand, the house’s current owner David McCart contends its his because the driveway provides access to his property. On the other hand, the City of Holdenville contends that they have a right to it because the slab was on city easement. As mentioned earlier, TBP’s claim on the property stems from his status as a common thief who answers to a different set of rules.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Home Crisis Investigation | ||||
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[via Barry]
Listen. We’ve talked about Tim Geithner’s housing troubles at length. The elfin Treasury Secretary and his wife Carole bought the Larchmont Tudor in 2004 for $1.602 million. Then buddy boy got a gig in DC and they tried to sell it March for $1.635 million. When that didn’t take, the price was dropped to $1.575 million. No dice. T. Geith was reduced to renting the place out for $7,500/month, which many have helpfully pointed out probably doesn’t even cover the li’l fella’s mortgage payments. So does he really need some hussy in a pantsuit going on TV and shouting it out that this thing is never gonna happen? No, he doesn’t, and dollars to donuts the first thing he thought while watching this segment on TDS last night was, “Lady, I’d like to tie you to the back of a fucking truck.” The pity from Shiller is nice, but a little embarrassing and likely caused the tips of TG’s ears to turn red, as they’re prone to do when he’s just been humiliated. Let’s just give the monumental failure (at house slinging) some room to breathe, okay? (And time to re-tile the bathroom, which Shiller notes is absolutely ghastly, and probably the reason no one will buy the place.)
$$$ Heidi Moore wants every to shut up about Goldman Sachs already. [The Big Money]
$$$ Brazilian Soccer Star Romario Proves that Hating Taxes is a World-Wide Institution [Going Concern]
$$$ Janet Tavakoli has bones to pick with Meredith Whitney, Nassim Taleb and Charlie Gasparino. [PDF]
$$$ AIG Not the Resume-Killer You Expected It to Be [Cityfile]
$$$ As to the eternal question of whether it’s faster to take Third Avenue or Park Avenue uptown, the former having staggered lights, the latter not, the former RenTec employee equivocated: “It depends on your nature. If you want speed right now, you take Park. If you like to understand a system and maximize it, you take Third. I’m a system guy.” [New Yorker]
Emergency mailbag:
About 40 Barclays S&T first years, all wearing Barclays T-shirts, are stuck in a broken down bus in the middle lane of an expressway somewhere in the vicinity of the Brooklyn bridge. They were on their way back from an end-of-training community service trip. Barclays has dispatched 15 black cars to pick up the Barclettes but the resulting traffic jam is so severe that none are getting through. The poor Barclettes are sweating it out Sanford style in a metal box with no air conditioning.
You know, you think you’ve met a nice, classy lady on Ashleymadison.com, a website who’s tagline is “life is short, have an affair,” and the next thing you she’s selling you out and you’re being convicted on six counts of securities fraud. James Gansman knows what we’re talking about, as he and his ho, Donna Murdoch, are the subject of a Wall Street Journal story along those lines. Gansman, an Ernst and Young partner who advised companies doing mergers about how to combine work forces before he got fired, met Murdoch in 2004. They would meet up in hotels in Philadelphia, New York and California (and when they weren’t together, exchanged 7,000 phone calls over the course of two years), but what really got Big D going was this kinky little game they’d play, which went something like this:
Eventually the two settled into a comfortable day-to-day routine in their respective offices in New York and Philadelphia, staring at the same Yahoo Finance screen. Mr. Gansman led Ms. Murdoch in a guessing game about which deals he was working on, she said.
“The game was that I wouldn’t be looking and he would give me hints: The market cap of two billion or market cap of 400 billion, and here’s what they do, and he’d read it to me, and ultimately make sure I guessed,” Ms. Murdoch testified. Before long, the guessing game fell away. Mr. Gansman told her more directly about upcoming deals of Ernst clients, she said.
Oh, but that wasn’t enough for Donna. She wasn’t satisfied. She needed more (money), so she met another dude who could get the job done (monetarily) and started two-timing Gansman.
The information wasn’t enough to pull off an insider-trading plan. Ms. Murdoch was in such financial difficulty — she and her husband owed $1.45 million on a subprime home mortgage — that she needed money to make trades.
She said she found the financial support of another man she met on Ashleymadison.com. According to her, he was Richard Hansen, currently listed as the chairman of an Oaks, Pa., broker-dealer called Keystone Equities Group. Ms. Murdoch became an employee of Keystone, and she shared Mr. Gansman’s stock tips with Mr. Hansen, she testified. She didn’t tell either man about her relationship with the other, she said.
Names like Bernard Madoff Investment Securities and Stanford Financial Group can understandably sneak under the SEC’s radar. But you might think that an outfit that goes by the name of Radical Bunny whose business model is strikingly similar to loan sharking might get a little bit of attention. The SEC’s watchful eye allowed over 900 investors to kick in just short of $200 million based, in part, on the claim that Bunnymen investments were not subject to securities laws. For anybody else who decided to turn over their cash to magic bean salesmen working at places called Fraudulent Monkey and the like, the SEC is waiting for your call.
And your money! Matthew Goldstein reports that the Allen Stanford court-appointed is seeking to clawback almost a billion from former employees and investors of Sir Stan, including Mr. Damon. Also: the Libyan government. And Kevin Bacon. No, just fucking– that one’s all B-boy, who always bags the best bitches.
015 20090728 Appendix in Support of Recs Amended Complaint Naming Relief Defendants
Fed up with the Senate Ethics Committee dragging their heels and delaying decisions which may never come or amount to anything, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd went on the record again that he was no special friend of Countrywide when he went to A-Moz for a refi back in 2003. Distraught that “allegations hurt” and that the tendency of people is to believe those allegations, Dodd may have finally found himself in the same situation that every Wall St. CEO who received a special invite from him over the past year has had to suffer through when explaining their own actions.
Brokers recently suffered the indignity of being “cattle-called” into the house that lies like “you can trust me with your money” built to assess what the sale of 133 East 64th Street might fetch. What kind of figure are we looking at? Talkin’ Neverland Ranch numbers? Apparently not, for three reasons. A. taint of the scam 2. the place is a shithole D. no nudie shots of Ruth left behind (I’m serious about that one).
CNBC Interview With Guy Who Chatted Up Bernie Yesterday Most Awkward/Awesome Thing To Come Out Of Scam To Date
By Bess Levin
“Tell us something specific that you learned” “No, I’m going to tell you something generic”
“Wait a second buddy, your publicist told us this was going to be a big story”
“Unbelievable, this guy”
