Alphonse D'Amato, NY Senator Bribed By NY Stockbroker, Sez Bernie Madoff Story Smells!
Alphonse D'Amato, former GOP senator from NY, knows a crook when he sees one. From the Southwest Sewer District to Mitchell Field to Wedtech to Stratton Oakmont, there were few financial scandals on Long Island in the last thirty years Senator Al wasn't involved in.
I busted out laughing when I read his 1/7/09 op-ed piece in the Long Island Businss News.
Senator Al nails it:
"Supposedly, Mark and Andrew, in a state of shock and disbelief, claimed to know nothing of their father's shenanigans, and turned him in to the federal government. To tell you this smells is an understatement. I find it ludicrous to believe that Madoff's sons, who worked with their father every day, were not aware of what was going on. We are told to believe that working alone, Madoff was able to manage billions of dollars, sending out fraudulent statements to thousands of investors, and was able to keep his sons who worked alongside him from knowing about his illegal activities. Maybe the Securities and Exchange Commission would fall for that story but I believe this is nothing more than a scheme to try and shield his sons from their culpability.
In 1996, the Securities and Exchange Commission fell for Senator D'Amato's story that he made $37,125 in a single day by trading honestly in the stock market.
(Ironically, D'Amato was conducting the Whitewater investigation at the time which encompassed Hillary Clinton's big score in the commodities market.)
Few people know Jordan Belfort, Senator Al's "stockbroker", testified in court in 2000 that he lied when he told the Senate Ethics Committee he did not arrange D'Amato's stock windfall. In his testimony, Belfort said he arranged the deal on D'Amato's request.
10/26/00 Newsday story by Susan Harrigan and Graham Rayman:
"D'Amato Probe Called A Whitewash / Original complainant says committees protect senators",
In the wake of pump-and-dump boiler-room king Jordan Belfort's claim that he lied to the Senate Ethics Committee during the 1996 probe of former New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, the man who filed the original ethics complaint against the senator blasted the committee for failing to thoroughly investigate the allegations.
"It was pretty clear that there was never much of an investigation into the complaint," said Gary Ruskin, director of the Congressional Accountability Project, which initially filed allegations in June, 1996, over D'Amato's one-day $37,125 stock-market killing. The trades were made by Belfort's firm, Stratton Oakmont, a notorious Lake Success-based stock brokerage. "The biggest lesson of this is that both the Senate and House ethics committees does not investigate corruption. They are set up to protect senators."
Belfort testified Tuesday in the federal money-laundering trial in Brooklyn of former Stratton Oakmont accountant Dennis Gaito that he lied when he told the Senate Ethics Committee he did not arrange D'Amato's stock windfall. In his testimony Tuesday, he said he arranged the deal on D'Amato's request.
Belfort had also told federal investigators he arranged the D'Amato stock trade after he was indicted on securities-fraud and money-laundering charges in September, 1998, as part of negotiations over a plea agreement, according to documents. Belfort pleaded guilty to fraud charges last year.
In September, 1996, the Ethics Committee found no wrongdoing on D'Amato's part. D'Amato spokeswoman Lisa Dewald said yesterday, "The perjured testimony of a self-confessed swindler has absolutely no credibility. The SEC, as well as the Senate Ethics Committee, did investigate this matter and found no inappropriate conduct on the part of the senator...Everything the senator did was right and proper."...
Here on Long Island, government is so corrupt, we named the new and very expensive federal courthouse in Central Islip after Alphonse D'Amato instead of putting him in it.
You guys are sure busy this morning. Good post.
I have a real problem with Al, I have disliked him for a long time. But I appreciate this op-ed and he is asking the same questions you were asking.
RICO, lets get em.
And $38,000 compared to 50 billion dollars.
And then $170,000,000 in Madoff's desk drawer--to his relatives and friends.
Let us all keep following the money.
January 10, 2009 12:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Madoff stole $50bn (or so we're told) of taxpayers' money. He and his family should go to jail for a long time.
But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, courtesy of Barney Frank, cost the taxpayers many multiples of this. Frank for years was very outspoken that FNM and FRE were fiscally sound and pushed back on attempts to further regulate them.
Why aren't we spending more time trying to put Barney Frank in jail too?
January 10, 2009 2:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Barney's a legislator. I do not wish to imprison anyone in Congress past or present for legislation.
If someone received monies a direct result of legislation that is another thing. Which is exactly what Cheney did, in effect even though he was acting as a member of the executive branch at the time. Releasing monies to his own company with no-bid contracts as, of course he had done before he was ever hired in the 90's.
Madoff simply cooked the books. The fruits of the forbidden tree went to family and friends including upper management. These monies should be confiscated under that rubric.
Strictly criminal prosecution may follow after indictments are issued for improprieties committed by the individual defendants under a RICO structure and just plain conspiracy. Then a trial would ensue where the standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt.
Now, if Barney pocketed monies as a quid pro quo for his vote and initiation of legislation that would also be appropriate.
But there is a general rule of Congressional immunity.
Thank you for your support.
January 10, 2009 2:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
D'Amato has looked fishy to me for years. We really have to push, push, push to get these people brought to justice. We need accountability. All of these people are innocent until proven guilty, but to not look into these matters at all? That is crazy. We do not need special investigators, we need a task force or a department that investigates these kind of deals.
Then for those found guilty, we must punish them to the full extent of the law. Considering their complete abuse of their position and the absolute greed, they need maximum security prison for serious offenders.
January 10, 2009 7:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
AMEN
January 10, 2009 7:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm with you on accountability but in the last fifteen years or so, corruption has become so pervasive and commonplace, I think people have forgotten they are supposed to care about it.
Just about everyone over a certain age on Long Island will laugh if you ask them if Al D'Amato is honest. Everyone knows he is a crook.
So why didn't Alphonse ever get bagged?
A big reason is Louie Freeh owed Senator Al big time. D'Amato got Louie a federal judgeship when Bush Sr was in office and then convinced Bill Clinton to appoint Freeh as FBI Director.
(Two of Clinton's biggest mistakes, imho, were hiring Freeh in the first place and not firing Freeh when it became obvious he was a GOP hit man.)
It's hilarious that Freeh speaks warmly of his friendship with D'Amato and their shared Italian heritage in his book. Does Freeh read the same newspapers I did?
Among the many stories about Alphonse is the one about him being the only person in New York who would testify as a character witness for mobster, Phil Basile, at his conspiracy trial.
Freeh repaid his debt to Senator Al many times over. When Jordan Belfort, the crooked Stratton Oakmont stockbroker, told the DOJ in 1998 he bribed D'Amato at D'Amato's request, shinola happened. Imagine if Belfort had bribed Clinton, instead of D'Amato?
Worse, D'Amato was a silent partner in a business with mob associate, Carl Lizza, in the '90s, something Freeh had to have known. The entire Gambino crime family knew it and one of them was an informant for the FBI. A cousin of a member of John Gotti's inner circle told me about D'Amato and Lizza so it was not exactly a big secret on Long Island.
Someone else told me about Senator Al stopping by Nastasi White, the big mobbed up drywall outfit, on a regular basis and picking up envelopes stuffed with cash.
After NYers got sick of Senator Al's shit and kicked him out of office in 1998, there was Telergy, the telecom that had to abort an ipo because the books were so cooked.
Then there was Senator Al's partner in his consulting firm, Park Strategies, who was indicted for bribing the Connecticut state treasurer to invest CT pension funds in the Carlyle Group.
Recently, Alphonse has been working to overturn local zoning laws so he can build a bunch of condos on a beach where no one else ever could.
D'Amato represents a bunch of defense contractors in DC which should tell you something. Like Alphonse D'Amato isn't any more honest today than he was thirty years ago.
D'Amato doesn't want more oversight from the SEC, the DOJ or any other regulatory body. He just wanted to spout off about Bernie's story being bullshit. Which everyone knows already.
Here's the most recent list of D'Amato's clients I have. It's from a 2006 NY Post story about D'Amato's lobbying business.
AIG
Alaska Structures
Lockheed Martin
Harris Corp
General Atomics
L-3 Communications
Collazo Enterprises, Inc.
First Advantage-Saverent
Goodrich Corp.
Klune Industries
Beralt Tin & Wolfram
Griffis Local Development Corp.
SAP America
Please note which company tops the list. You may recall the AIG CEO and CFO never got hauled up to Capitol Hill to testify to Congress about how they got in so much financial trouble. Now you know why and now you know why AIG got all the money it was looking for and more.
Trivia question of the day:
Elliot Spitzer was Client #9. According to the NY Post, Client #7 was a NY judge. Name the judge.
January 11, 2009 10:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
I saw a photo of that fuck Louie Freeh sitting next to Eric Holder the other day in DC. The prick was probably telling Holder to lay off the GOP because Freeh still has the goods on Hillary Clinton.
One of reasons why I didn't want Hillary Clinton to run for president is that Louie Freeh has Clinton on tape talking to Paul Adler, the former Rockland County Democratic chairman. I don't know what's on the tapes and I wasn't sure if any Dems other than Clinton and Paul Adler knew either.
Paul Adler was investigated and ultimately convicted on corruption charges in 2001. If I recall, the charges had to do with a real estate deal. I checked the federal prisoner locator and he only got out in 2004.
Somebody in the Bush administration went out of his or her way to make life miserable for Adler. He didn't do anything every other politician in New York is doing and that was a stiff sentence relatively speaking.
Cripes, Charlie Gargano was the president of the state's economic development corporation, the ESDC, and the vice-chairman of the NY-NJ Port Authority when he served on the board of a crooked penny stock company along with a corrupt NY contractor.
I spent months investigating Charlie Gargano and everyone connected to Eagle Building Products because after 9/11, Eagle tried to sell fake terrorism equipment to the government.
Supposedly Charlie resigned from the Eagle board on 10/12/01 but I don't think he expressed any of his concerns to the SEC, if he had any, about
Eagle's integrity. It wasn't until months later that the SEC moved in.
For seven years, I've been trying to find out if Gargano cashed in the Eagle options he would have earned for being a director. He was entitled to 60,000 shares a year and he joined the board in April (June?) 2000.
Eagle's shares skyrocketed from $3 to $12 after it announced it was selling anti-terrorist cargo scanning equipment made by Biosterile Tehcnologies (which is a doozy of a story in itself.) I remember the anti-terrorist software but I don't remember what the other crap was.
The point of investigating Charlie was to demonstrate that no one was going to get to the bottom of 9/11 because corruption was so pervasive in government and business.
One of the few things I knew for certain after 9/11 was that Charlie was a crook because in 1979 he was involved in the Southwest Sewer District scandal, a favorite of mine.
At the time, I worked in an Italian restaurant where Charlie and the rest of the sewer rates used to hang out. I saw Charlie chat with Aniello "Neil" Migliore there so I know for myself he is on a first name basis with the head of the Lucchese family (Neil was #2 then.)
My approach to my research was to assume anyone who did business with Charlie was crooked. I knew, too, Newsday and the NY Times knew Charlie was corrupt because they tried to warn everybody in NYS in 1996 that this was not a guy who should have access to billions of taxpayer dollars.
There is a big problem with organized crime in the Staten Island port and a lot of military equipment runs through there. Don't take my word - the Staten Island Advance used to write about it all of the time.
LOL - I was checking shipping schedules once and noticed a banana boat comes into Staten Island weekly from Ecuador through the Panama Canal. The light went on and I knew I knew then how a lot of coke gets into the city.
After 9/11, everyone in DC was having a party ont the taxpayer's dime. I will never forget the look on the faces of Trent Lott and Tom Daschle when they announced outside of the capitol one afternoon that they had just spent $11 billion on our behalf. The two of them were beaming and looked like they had just had sex.
Me, I'm sitting there thinking all the money in the world wasn't going to make us one bit safer if the people in charge were corrupt. I couldn't believe how how low this country had stooped when nobody was offended at the idea that the vice chairman of the NY-NJ Port Authority could make a million bucks exercising stock options from a company that made fake terrorism equipment while the firemen were still picking through the rubble at ground zero.
That was the ultimate in corruption for me at the time and I still get incensed thinking about it.
Enough. Back to Paul Adler who had some sort of relationship with the Clintons in the '90s because I read he stayed at the White House. When the First Lady decided to run for NY senator, Adler took her around the state. In fact, Mrs. Clinton stayed at his house at least once.
I imagine Louie Freeeh decided to investigate Paul Alder when he got wind of Clinton's plans. I have no doubt, btw, that there were members of the Secret Service who were quite happy to pass along info about the Clintons.
In any event, the FBI wiretapped Adler while he squired the First Lady around NYS.
Adler probably was responsible for arranging Bill Clinton's commutation of the prison sentences of the New Square Four which was an extremely reckless thing for him to do and another reason why Hillary shouldn't be president.
The Orthodox Jews do not have loyalty to anyone but themselves. They would have no problem passing along info about paying bribes etc if they thought it was in their best interest to do so.
Evidence that the Clintons were bribed, albeit indirectly (I hope), would have been a valuable asset for the New Square rabbi. He could have traded at the state or federal level at the time because Pataki was in office. Grants, tax breaks, free land, get-out-jail-free cards, you name it and the Orthodox Jews will take it.
And that's all I have to say about that fuck, Louie Freeh for now. Ask someone at the FBI how the scumbag treated Robert Hanssen's wife and brother-in-law when they tried to do the right thing and turn in a menace to our safety.
Mrs Hanssen, as far as I can see, was willing to give up an awful lot when she tried to turn her husband into the FBI in 1989 and Louie Freeh blew her off. Ask Mrs Hanssen about her life therafter.
If I were president and I confirmed the facts about the Hanssen case as I know them, I'd give Mrs. Hanssen and her brother a big apology for the way they were treated by their own government when they tried to turn a terrorist in.
Freeh didn't want to embarrass George Senior so he kept the Hanssen story under wraps for more than ten years. Then he tried to make it look like it was another case of Clinton's negligence on his way out the door but by then, no one cared.
And now, that's all I really have to say.
January 22, 2009 3:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
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March 21, 2009 3:36 AM | Reply | Permalink