For more than a year, they ran their swindle out of the Park Avenue boardroom of Clifford Chance, which was, at the time, the largest law firm in the world.
After the Bernie Madoff thing broke here, lots of Hollywood people who'd made all the money they ought to ever need, creative people who aren't always the most financially savvy, came out of semi-retirement to recoup their swindled fortunes.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Justice Department in Chicago said two men from Illinois had been arrested for a Ponzi-like scheme of their own, swindling $15.0 million to pay for a high-priced lifestyle that included strip clubs, jewelry and private jets.
(See "Another Day, Another Ponzi").. On Wednesday, the U.S. Justice Department in Chicago said two men from Illinois had been arrested for a "Ponzi-like" scheme of their own, swindling $15.0 million to pay for a high-priced lifestyle that included strip clubs, jewelry and private jets.
The Huffington Post in April reported that the Education Department was considering imposing new hurdles for student loan borrowers seeking to get out of their debts by claiming their schools swindled them.
Go to the F.B.I.'s "most wanted" webpage for white-collar crime and what leaps out is how many on the list are nonwhite and how petty their swindles are.
It may be that Trump's continuous stream of insults and oddities — say, going off on South Korea when North Korea detonates a bomb — is not clinical but tactical, a high-level version of the distracting patter perfected by the three-card monte guys who used to work their swindles on the street corners around midtown Manhattan.
It turns out that the orchids need both the right look and the right smell to pull off their swindle.
The nicknames that Goldman sharks tagged on their marks -- "muppets" and "hunting elephants" -- is reminiscent of Get Shorty and the Star Wars-themed nicknames that Enron crooks used as code for their swindles and "special purpose entities" (whose only "special purpose," it turned out, was to rip off employees, defraud investors and bilk consumers).
He had neglected to actually apologize for anything he was going to jail for swindling their money, and here they were, reaching for their second wave of donations.
