Danny Schechter - ColdType

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attracted a slew of illustrious former politicians and government
officials to advise and sit on their boards. Among them:
Former House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey; former
presidential envoy to Iraq L. Paul Bremer III; and former Senator
Larry L. Pressler. Mandell and his employees are also contributors
to politicians, including Eliot Spitzer.
Is Ross Mandell a changed man? Pressler, a Republican
from South Dakota, thinks so. “I’ve come to know Ross
Mandell personally,” he says. “I concede that in the 1990s
he made some mistakes, but I believe in second chances
for people. He’s an entrepreneur and a businessman, honest
and good.”
Another case, in Manhattan, involved 13 real estate professionals
including lawyers and bank workers accused of a
multi-million dollar mortgage fraud. A prosecutor was quoted
as saying that if the mortgage firm “had a legitimate side, it
was by accident.” In this case $12 million in mortgages were
falsified and home values were fudged.
Finally, Marc S. Dreier, a prominent lawyer, was facing a
145-year sentence being proposed by prosecutors for elaborate
frauds estimated at $400 million. He had already pled guilty.
In a pre-sentencing letter to the Judge, Dreier tried to
explain his own descent into a life of crime. This is part of a
document of the times:
As I sit here today, I can’t remember or imagine why I didn’t
stop myself. It all seems so obviously deplorable now. I recall
only that I was desperate for some measure of the success
that I felt had eluded me. I felt that my law firm was my last
chance to make a mark for myself, and I was fearful of seeing
it fail. I know of course that this amounted to nothing more
than self-pity, but this was my state of mind when I became
a criminal. I gave in to being overwhelmed by the anxieties
of life that we are all expected to cope with every day, and
most people do, but I just could not manage to do so. I had