Listen, I know Federal District Court Judge Kenneth Karas *had* to inquire as to whether or not Sam Israel was sane enough to enter into a guilty plea for bail jumping in June because he didn’t want to go to prison but come on, buddy. WAKE UP. You are getting played by a man who fucks egrets.* Hasn’t EB already proved himself to be someone who can’t be trusted to tell the truth? Or is the whole, defrauding of clients, faking his own suicide stuff water under the bridge?
Karas asked Israel yesterday to rank his clear-mindedness on a scale of 1 to 100 (which, since we’re nitpicking the legal system, also seems ridiculous. Should be a yes or no question. Are you crazy? Yes or no. None of this on a scale of bat-shit insane to completely lucid, where do you stand business, because where do you draw the line? Can you send someone to jail who’s “Not nuts but definitely cripplingly neurotic”? Do you put your foot down at “I’ve had many a sleepless night trying to figure out who was behind the premeditated destruction of Corey Haim’s career”?). Israel thought about it for a few seconds and answered, “About 70 percent,” to which Karas responded, “Seventy percent is not a number that makes me feel comfortable” and delayed the hearing to September 16, giving Egret Boy exactly what he wanted–yet another chance to escape, and, should he screw that up again, ample time to research whether or not conjugal visits necessarily have to be human on human.
Judge Delays Hearing for Fund Manager Who Fled [AP]
*Circumstantial evidence.

Former hedge fund manager-cum-performance artist Samuel Israel III who faked his own death this summer because he didn’t want to go to jail is set to plead guilty to bail-jumping this afternoon. The industry’s biggest M*A*S*H fan and only (known) egret lover waived an indictment on a charge of failure to surrender for his prison sentence before U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Margaret Smith this morning, but the formal plea must be entered before U.S. District Court Kenneth Karas later today. And I think we all know what that means but for the non-ambitious ones in the group, I’ll tell you what it means: there’s still time for him to make a run for it.
Ex-hedge fund manager to plead guilty to bail-jumping [Reuters]

This is fantastically rich(er than the now destitute Bayou Group investors Sam Israel screwed back in the day): in 2004, desperate to raise money to save his fund, the industry’s biggest M*A*S*H fan turned to a man named Robert Booth Nichols for help in the dollars and cents department, and was himself conned out of $10 million.
According to Bloomberg, Nichols cheated Israel in a “prime bank” fraud, promising Egret Boy “quick riches in secret markets” that did not in fact exist. Now a not yet on the lam Nichols is being sued. The original Con Man, who denies any wrongdoing, claims that he was helping Israel invest in a “legitimate, though unspecified ‘project’ involving U.S. government obligations,” and had “no reason to believe Israel was engaging in fraud.”
Not saying Nichols isn’t full of shit but, as you may recall, Sam Israel is said to have believed in time travel, and before the hours got crazy over at his Ponzi-scheme, spent nights and weekends building a Delorean in his basement, which he at one point claimed to have been working on for the government. Oh, and Nichols also says that his services, which “involved matters of national interest,” had been given the okay John P. Ellis, “a first cousin of President Bush.”
So anyway…if your brain hasn’t yet exploded, take some time this afternoon to try and dig up Nichols’s business card. It has got to be as least as valuable as Israel’s, and if the stories that Con Man #1 liked to get even friskier when it came to a love of plumage that dared not speak its name and their subsequent renderings on his b-card than #2, perhaps more so.
Bayou’s Israel Was Cheated in Scam, Investigator Says [Bloomberg]