Last Friday, Bloomberg printed a hilarious story about a girl named Carrianne Howard, who’s fallen on hard time. Currently, Howard works at a topless bar called Lido Cabaret in Cocoa Beach, Florida. But, wait, that’s not the funny part. What made the story a laugh riot was that the reporter/editor made the hugely tenuous (at best!) link that Howard’s travails– her parents had spent $70,000 for her to earn a bachelor’s degree in game and art design from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, which helped her score an entry level job in her industry of choice after graduating in December 2007, from which she was later laid off and had to turn to showing her tits for money– were the fault of Goldman Sachs, as the bank owns 38 percent of the Art Institute’s parent, Education Management Corp. Over the weekend, Carrianne took to YouTube to respond, clarifying the facts. Continue reading »
Strippers
Hedge Fund Managers Shorting For-Profit Schools Have New Ally In Stripper Carrianne Howard
By Bess Levin
Meet Carrianne Howard. She’s the woman pictured at left in red. Some of you may not recognize her but if we took away the dress and diploma, that’d probably jog the memories of those who’ve spent time at the Lido Cabaret, a topless club in Cocoa Beach, Florida. That’s where the 26 year-old now works, for $400 to $1,000 a week, where she landed after a stint doing “adult web chats.”
It’s not the career trajectory Howard, 26, envisioned for herself, when she enrolled at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, and had her parents plunked down $70,000 in tuition and fees for her to earn a bachelor’s degree in game and art design and, per usual, there’s one person or group of persons to blame. Goldman Sachs. Continue reading »
In Retrospect, There Were A Bunch Of Things Accused Ponzi Schemer Kenneth Starr Didn’t See Coming
By Bess Levin
Say what you will about alleged Ponzi schemer Ken Starr, but the guy wasn’t stupid. He knew how to leverage his “friendship” with Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson into big name clients for his scam operation and he kept them going for quite some time. Still, he apparently wasn’t the most perceptive guy in the bunch. As previously mentioned, he didn’t realize that obscenely flashy purchases and a high-profile, rather than laying low and not sticking out, might make people go, “hey wait a second…” and he apparently also didn’t realize that when you marry a stripper, known for her “pole-dancing prowess,” she might be proud of/want to publicly pat herself on the back over said skills.
Two days before his arrest for allegedly cheating clients out of $59 million, financial adviser Kenneth Starr presided at one of Harry Cipriani’s coveted front-room tables, with a view of the Plaza and Central Park, and grinned when his wife, Diane, protested, not very seriously, that she’d thought their third-anniversary dinner would be a private affair. Diane Passage, 34, was wearing a black Gucci dress with a scoop neck that kept slipping to expose more of her Brobdingnagian breasts than the designer had intended—only when she got home would she realize she had it on backward—but Starr, 66, was proud of his fourth wife’s provocative figure. He liked to brag about her pole-dancing prowess. Only when she brought up her past employment as a dancer at Scores strip club did he wince. Why, though? she would ask him. She had nothing to hide.
Yeah, and she’s probably pretty damn pleased with the fact that those moves were what landed her her big shot husband in the first place. Think, Starr, think! Continue reading »
If she has to, she has to.
When you marry a rich man whose income affords you the opportunity to quit your job, it’s important to have a skill-set to fall back on in the event it turns out he’s running a Ponzi scheme. Luckily, Diane Passage, who was told by an SEC lawyer today that regulators will “oppose any attempt to unfreeze [her husband Kenneth] Starr’s crooked assets to cover living expenses for her and her 12-year-old son Jordan” has got some extremely monetizable skills as a former stripper. Continue reading »
Turns out mortgages weren’t the only toxic assets Wall Street decided to package into CDOs. Small community banks issued billions of dollars in trust preferred securities before the credit crunch as a way to prop up their capital cushions. Problem was, the only way they could sell the so-called TruPS to investors was to combine them with other trust-preferreds in CDOs. Continue reading »
Listen. I get the SEC has to make up for their many, many past fuck-ups. And some people’s scams are actually worthy of being shut down, especially when whoever is running it is spending his/her ill-gotten gains on entirely selfish purchases that will make only them happy and no one else. But what of the con-artists who, while perhaps not running the most legit shops, are taking whatever money they’ve stolen and using it to spread joy far and wide in the form of, for instance, “sexually themed cruises”? Apparently the SEC sees no distinction when, to us, it’s black, white and wearing boob tassels.
The Securities and Exchange Commission today filed an emergency enforcement action to halt a fraudulent scheme being orchestrated by two co-owners of an Albany, N.Y.-based firm who misused investor money to fund their struggling business operations and meet ever-increasing liquidity needs. The SEC has obtained a court order to freeze their assets.
This morning Wall Street was smirking over the possibility that an intern at Goldman Sachs had resorted to working as a stripper because her position at the firm was unpaid. Within Goldman, the possibility had launched speculation about exactly which intern might be the stripper. Outside of the firm, it was being treated as a delicious scandal.
But is there really a stripper working at Goldman?
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