RUINED LIVES

Once upon a time there was a con man – a world class con man.

He did not start out to be a con man. He bought a business. He wanted it to be bigger. He needed it to be bigger. So he grew it and leveraged it to the max, and grew it some more, until it failed. And he went bankrupt.

But that did not stop him, or even slow him down. He started over.

He had a big loud personality and he was a natural born salesman. He convinced thousands of people to trust him with their hard earned money. He became a huge success at projecting success.

You have probably known men like him, in your own life, but this man was bigger, more self-confident, and more flamboyant than the smaller and more common versions that cross our paths.

The con man made millions and eventually billions. He lived a lavish lifestyle – a lifestyle of the rich and famous.

Then came rumors of bribing government officials and money laundering.

The Feds began investigating.

I need to pause here, in case you think I am speaking of Donald J. Trump, which I am not, except that there is a connection.

Robert Allen Stanford had been running a $8 billion Ponzi scheme, defrauding nearly 30,000 investors.

Federal investigators raided his offices and gathered evidence. When Stanford’s business empire crumbled, he blamed the government’s “Gestapo tactics” for its demise. He maintained his innocence even after he was found guilty of money laundering, mail fraud, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice.

The prosecution, in seeking the maximum punishment, argued compellingly that he was guilty of “economic murder,” for the many lives he had ruined. Robert Allen Stanford, who had become one of the richest men in America, is now serving a 110 year sentence in federal prison.

To win that jumbo sentence, the prosecutors needed slam dunk evidence, and they needed the testimony of someone who knew where each and every body was buried, and just how each of those bodies got there.

They needed to flip James Davis, Stanford’s college roommate, best friend, blood brother (yes, they did the blood mingling thing), chief financial officer, and co-conspirator. They needed to make him testify against his blood brother.

And they did!

What you should know about this gratifying (except for those who were swindled) crime and punishment story is that the prosecutor who led the investigation was Greg Andres.

Greg Andres now works for Robert Mueller. He is just one of seventeen hand chosen specialists investigating Donald Trump. You don’t hear so much as a peep from any of them. Quiet is becoming the new cool.

Oh one more thing!

As the Mueller investigation moves closer to its conclusion, Donald Trump will make this personal. You can count on it. He will single out the investigators as being Hilary-loving and-Obama-loving, elitist political hacks. But I seriously doubt that Greg Andres will be intimidated by name calling coming from the subject of an investigation, regardless of how dangerous that subject might be.

If you doubt me, just ask former Bonanno mob boss, Vincent “Vinnie Gorgeous” Basciano, who hated Greg Andres so much that he planned on killing him.

As mob rat Generoso “Jimmy the General” Barbieri testified in court:

 “Basciano said that Greg Andres destroyed the Bonanno Family. He ruined all our lives. We should make an example of him.”

With the hope of getting a few years knocked off his life sentence, former Bonanno mob boss, Joseph Massino gave prosecutors the specifics of the planned “hit.”

According to Massino, Vinnie Gorgeous would walk into a restaurant on New York’s east side where Greg Andres was known to dine on Thursday nights, walk up to his table and shoot him.

Vinnie Gorgeous did not get to kill Greg Andres. Instead, he and other key members of the Bonanno crime family are serving life sentences in federal prison.

Greg Andres did, in fact, ruin all of their lives, and it was he who made examples of them!

Besides Greg Andres, and of course Robert Mueller, there are at least sixteen team members who are not yet finished ruining the lives of those who deserve it.

They are: Andrew Weissmann, Michael Dreeben, Jeannie Rhee, Zainab Amed, Aaron Zelinski, Kyle Freeny, Andrew Goldstein, James Quarles, Elizabeth Prelogar, Brandon Van Grack, Adam Jed, Scott Meisler, Rush Atkinson, Brian Richardson, Ryan Dickey, and Uzo Asonye.

And, for now, that is my two minutes worth.

CRIME UNIVERSITY

As far as I know, a school for criminals does not exist. That is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your point of view. If you are in favor of the survival of the civilized world, it can be somewhat reassuring that criminal wannabes cannot enroll in a prestigious institution, created to educate and graduate some of the worst among us.

Crooks learn by doing. This imperfect, unsystematic learning system eventually results in most of them getting caught for committing crimes that they should have gotten away with, thanks to sloppy execution.

Sure, there are elite criminals, like the gang that robbed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston, stealing priceless masterpieces, without leaving a trace.  At Crime University, they could be professors or guest lecturers.

Remember that time you were sitting in a bar, having a great conversation and drinking way too much, and began saying things you should not have said? You blurted out a few things that you later regretted. But I doubt that you revealed any information, while “feeling no pain,” that triggered an FBI investigation into a campaign for the presidency of the United States.

But that is exactly what George Papadopoulos did, in a London pub, when he informed an Australian diplomat that he knew that Russia had dirt on Hilary Clinton.

Had he attended Crime University, he would have been required to take a class called Crime Basics. In that class, he would have learned that drinking and bragging can land you in prison or force you to become a cooperating witness.

Had Michael Cohen attended that same class, he would have learned that when juggling multiple crimes, it is absolutely fundamental to stay organized. Why is that so important? Because when you are in possession of 3.7 million files, you have to know which of those files will put you or your client in prison.

That way, when you begin shredding documents ahead of a police raid, you are not wasting precious time shredding CVS and Costco monthly fliers. You only shred documents related to hush money, money laundering, bank fraud, and of course absolutely anything related to Russian oligarchs.

And, you have to be thorough. You do not leave document shreds in the shredding machine, because there are people who will painstakingly sift through those shreds and glue them back together to restore the documents you spent all that time shredding, which is exactly what the FBI did.

At Crime University, he would have learned that shreds need to be flushed!

And imagine that you are brought before a judge and placed under house arrest, and required to wear an ankle bracelet while awaiting trial. If you are a white collar criminal, out on bail, you are being spared the ugly experience of going to jail, where some of your fellow guests will regard you as fresh meat. So you do not want to violate the conditions of that parole by committing a brand new crime, which is exactly what Paul Manafort did, while wearing not one, but two ankle bracelets.

Paul, Paul, Paul, why would you think that you could get away with witness tampering by sending encrypted messages through a Russian agent to two potential witnesses with the purpose of getting their stories straight, while Bob Mueller and the Untouchables are praying for you to screw up?

So much for Crime 101!  At Crime University, there would be an advanced course called Crimes You Should Never Attempt.

As the new National Security Advisor, Mike Flynn should have just said No! to outside income opportunities. When the Turkish despot offered him $15 million to kidnap the exiled opposition leader from his home in Pennsylvania, and give him a one-way plane ride to a Turkish prison, Mike should have said, “I’m sorry. I could sure use the $15 million, but I am pretty sure it’s illegal to commit a kidnapping on behalf of a foreign government.”

But, he didn’t say that, and he didn’t cover his tracks – not that he could have covered his tracks. From the beginning, General/Foreign Agent Flynn was no match for the federal bloodhounds who caught him in so many lies, he had to cop a deal, preventing him from kidnapping anyone.

Sad as his story is, he could someday become a respected authority on Crimes You Should Never Attempt. In the post-Trump era, you might see him doing a TED Talk.

I want to be very clear that I am not in favor of the creation of Crime University, but I think it might be valuable to establish The Museum of Political Crime. In fact, I would put it at Mar-a-Lago, once it is confiscated as criminal forfeiture.

The very thought of that makes me want to go past my two minutes.

I HAVE BAD NEWS

I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and justice for his fellow human beings, and he died for that effort.

In this difficult day for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what kind and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black – considering the evidence, there evidently is, that there were white people who were responsible – you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization – black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust for the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States; we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom from the awful grace of God."

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love – a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we’ve had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and our people.

This speech was given by Robert F. Kennedy, on April 4, 1968 in Indianapolis, Indiana, in the heart of the inner city. RFK was warned by the police that he could not be protected in the event of a riot. He went anyway.

That night riots broke out in over one hundred U.S. cities, but not in Indianapolis, where the crowd went home weeping, but not rioting.

We are frequently told that as a nation, we are hopelessly divided, that we have become increasingly tribal, that our lines of separation have become permanently hardened.

Maybe we just need to bring the Indianapolis speech into our classrooms and never vote for any man or woman who cannot pass a quiz on its context or content.