Toby Carroll is a New Zealand-born real estate analyst for HSBC currently stationed in Dubai. If you’re a colleague in the field currently trying to get in touch with him, you’ll have to wait a bit longer, because he currently in prison. Continue reading »
prison
HSBC Analyst Gets Knife Pulled On Him For Going On A Date One Day After Breaking Up With His Girlfriend, Spends Two Months (And Counting) In Jail
By Bess LevinAs you may have heard, the Feds are currently hoping to nail a not insignificant number of people for insider trading. Whether you’ve merely dabbled in the hot tips game or traded on material non-public information so many times you’ve lost count, the question ‘Would I survive in the big house?’ may have crossed your mind. It’s a legitimate worry but today you can unclench your fear-stricken ass. Continue reading »
Merrill Lynch Banker And Colleagues May Serve Time For Playing Texas Hold ‘Em In Hong Kong
By Bess LevinApparently that is wrong in HK, and they should not have done that. What they should have done was either a) take the ferry to Macau, “the Vegas of Asia,” or b) done some horse betting, which is cool with the authorities. Continue reading »
Allen Stanford Wants Out Of Prison, Claims Constitutional Rights, Among Other Things, Are Being Violated
By Bess Levin
How can we get back to here?
Hey remember Allen Stanford? It’s been a while, hasn’t it? When we last checked in with the accused Ponzier, in December, a prison psychologist was arguing that if the guy wasn’t let out of jail ASAP, it was very likely he’d “a complete nervous breakdown.” Apparently that wasn’t a convincing argument for those who make the decisions as to whether or not people are just allowed to up and leave because he’s still there, asking to be freed. Stanford, who never recovered after the SEC robbed him of being listed as the 405th wealthiest person in the world by Forbes, said in a filing that he should be cut loose because 1) keeping him behind bars is unconstitutional 2) he’s been getting some serious shit kicked out of him.
In a filing on Tuesday with the federal court in Houston, lawyers for Stanford said their client had been “subjected to substantial and undeniable punishment,” including nearly a year of incarceration and both physical and psychological damage. This and the prospect of more than a year of further custody until and during his trial, which is scheduled to start in January 2011, violates his constitutional rights to due process, effective assistance of counsel, a speedy trial, and an absence of excessive bail, the lawyers said. “When Mr. Stanford surrendered to authorities, he was a healthy 59-year-old man,” Stanford’s Houston-based lawyer, Robert Bennett, wrote in a brief on which Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz consulted.
As previously mentioned, Bernie Madoff’s life in prison is prettay prettay prettay good. Fellow inmates make him delicious wrap sandwiches, he’s in with “the homosexual posse,” and every now and then he gets stoned. The Jouranal checked in with the big man, and reports today that things are still going quite nicely. He plays bocce, chess and checkers. He “walks around the prison with his head held high.” And he’s got respect. “To every con artist, he is the godfather, the don,” says an inmate interviewed earlier this week. One thing that does chap his hide though? The cockbags he used to employ, who got off easy. I mean sure, the scam was his idea, and he did most of the heavy lifting, all of which they benefited from– and he didn’t hear any complaints at the time. Maybe, when he gets out of the joint, he’ll come down there and give them a crew cut.
Mr. Madoff chatted about the fraud’s aftermath, claiming he “carried” employees at Bernard L. Madoff Securities LLC for more than two decades, yet wound up with an astronomical prison sentence. “I guess he felt they turned their back on him,” Mr. White says.
Despite this upset, Berns knows he’s got it going pretty good, and also that he’s hot shit. That’s why fellow inmates have tried to get his signature to sell on eBay, and make bank. That, Mades will not go along with but he will sit for any interested in sketching the man, the myth, the legend in all his regalness.
Sentencing for federal crimes is governed by federal sentencing guidelines and a “severity points” system developed by the Federal Sentencing Commission. There’s a very thick manual with lots of detail involved, but basically the process (omitting quite a bit) goes like this.
1. Determine the base offense level.
2. Make any changes due to “Special Offense Characteristics.”
3. Add or subtract any “adjustments.”
4. Apply the perpetrator’s criminal history.
5. Add up all the points, read the sentence range on the chart.
So… when we read this:
A financial manipulation scheme cost American International Group investors at least $544 million, a judge has estimated…
We can play the Grand Prize Game!
Ethan Roberts knows about mackerel discipline first hand. Mr. Roberts, who was released in 2007 after serving eight years on a methamphetamine charge at prisons including the La Tuna Federal Correctional Institution in Texas, says he got busted for various piscine transactions. “I paid gambling debts” with mackerel, he says. “One time I bought cigarettes for a friend who was in the hole.”
Frankly, other than linking to our old friend, I’m not sure what else I can add.
Mackerel Economics in Prison Leads to Appreciation for Oily Fillets [Wall Street Journal]
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