Danny Schechter - ColdType

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way: “When we think of regular crime – someone stealing
something in the dead of the night – you know, or sort of law
and order murder type crime scenes or larceny type crime –
you think of covert taking. Whether it’s a material of life or
whatever, it’s an extraction that’s illegal.
On Wall Street a lot of the extraction tends to be very borderline
legal, because the people extracting tend to be the
ones setting up the legal framework. So you’re creating a
crime scene, and you are creating the crime, and you are
effectively buying the police officers, all at the same time only
in the form of a regulatory body or a politician.
Yet, this also didn’t just happen. It was engineered by some
of the smartest minds in the business world working with
some of the slickest high-billing law firms.
This seems to be recognized by some journalists even though
there have been few probes into the combo of crime and the
crash. The suspicions are almost subconscious but sometimes
surface in strange ways.
Perhaps that’s why Time magazine’s story of the top twenty-five
people they considered responsible for the crisis –
financiers, regulators, politicians and officials – carried a photo
shoot staged against the backdrop of a police line-up.
On July 9th, 2009, to pick just one day, the New York Times
was reporting three major fraud cases, all as separate unconnected
stories.
One was about a firm called Sky Capital, a Wall Street retail
broker, charged with securities, wire and mail fraud in a $140
million fraud scheme. The head of the firm Ross Mandell was
arrested. In 2005, Forbes ran this item on an earlier incident in
which he was involved:
Mandell, while denying the problems, blamed his troubles on
a cocaine addiction from which he was recovered.
Despite Mandell’s checkered record, his companies have