The Carollo case: THE POLITICIANS (they sold us out big-time for peanuts)

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia | Politics News | Rolling Stone:

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"The Carollo case provides far more than a detailed look at the mechanics and pervasiveness of bid rigging; it offers a clear and unvarnished blueprint of the architecture of American financial and political corruption. In an attempt to discredit the CDR witnesses, defense counsel hounded them about other revelations that surfaced in the government's investigation, particularly those that involved bribery, illegal campaign contributions and pay-for-play schemes.

The defense's cross-examinations were surreal. It was ­certainly true that some of the government's cooperating witnesses had dubious résumés, so it may have made sense to highlight their generally duplicitous history of tax evasion or lying to investigators. But in their zeal, defense counsel went far beyond simply discrediting the witnesses, spending an inordinate amount of time eliciting even more details about the grotesque corruption scheme their own clients had taken part in. The result was a rare and somewhat confusing spectacle: high-octane lawyers from Wall Street working to rip the lid off Wall Street corruption in open court.

Defense counsel showed us, for instance, how CDR employees were routinely directed by their boss, David Rubin, to make political contributions to select candidates, only to be reimbursed by Rubin for those contributions later on. This kind of corporate skirting of campaign finance limits is something we've always suspected goes on, but we rarely get to see direct evidence of it.

More interesting, though, were the stories about political payoffs. In 2001, CDR hired a consultant named Ron White, a Philadelphia bond attorney who happened to be the chief ­fundraiser for then-mayor John Street. CDR gave White two tickets to the 2003 Super Bowl in San Diego plus a limo – a gift worth $10,000. As his "guest," White took Corey Kemp, the city treasurer for Philadelphia, who, 16 days later, awarded CDR a $150,000 contract to advise the city on swap deals. But that wasn't the end of the gravy train: CDR doled out those swap deals to selected banks, who in return kicked back $515,000 to CDR for steering city business their way.

So a mere $10,000 bribe to a politician – a couple of Super Bowl tickets and a limo – scored CDR a total of $665,000 of the public's money. If you want to know why Wall Street has been enjoying record profits, here's your answer: Corruption is a business model that brings in $66 for every dollar you invest.

Even more startling was the way that a notorious incident involving former New Mexico governor and presidential candidate Bill Richardson resurfaced during the trial. Barack Obama, you may recall, had nominated Richardson to be commerce secretary – only to have the move blow up in his face when tales of Richardson accepting bribes began to make the rounds. Federal prosecutors never brought a case against Richardson: In 2009, an inside source told the AP that the investigation had been "killed in Washington." Obama himself, after Richardson bowed out, praised the former governor as an "outstanding public servant."

Now, in the Carollo trial, defense counsel got Doug Goldberg, the CDR broker, to admit that his boss, Stewart Wolmark, had handed him an envelope containing a check for $25,000. The check was payable to none other than Moving America Forward – Bill Richardson's political action committee. Goldberg then went to a Richardson fundraiser and handed the politician the envelope. Richardson, pleased, told Goldberg, "Tell the big guy I'm going to hire you guys."

Goldberg admitted on the stand that he understood "the big guy" to mean Wolmark. After that came this amazing testimony:

Q: Soon after that, New Mexico hired CDR as its swap and GIC adviser on a $400 million deal, right? 
A: Yes. 
Q: You learned later that that check in that envelope was a check for $25,000, right? 
A: Yes. I learned it later. 
Q: You also learned later that CDR gave another $75,000 to Gov. Richardson, right? 
A: Yes. 
Q: CDR ended up making about a million dollars on this deal for those two checks?
A: Yes. 
Q: In fact, New Mexico not only hired CDR, they hired another firm to do the actual work that they needed done? 
A: For the fixed-income stuff, yes.

What we get from this is that CDR paid Bill Richardson $100,000 in contributions and got $1.5 million in public money in return. And not just $1.5 million, but $1.5 million for work they didn't even do – the state still had to hire another firm to do the actual job. Nice non-work, if you can get it.

To grasp the full insanity of these revelations, one must step back and consider all this information together: the bribes, yes, but also the industrywide, anti-competitive bid-rigging scheme. It turns into a kind of unbroken Möbius strip of corruption – the banks pay middlemen to rig auctions, the middlemen bribe politicians to win business, then the politicians choose the middlemen to run the auctions, leading right back to the banks bribing the middlemen to rig the bids.

When we allow Wall Street to continually raid the public cookie jar, we're not just enriching a bunch of petty executives (Wolmark's income in 2008, two years after he was busted in the FBI raid, was $2,464,210.18) – we're effectively creating an alternate government, one in which money lifted from the taxpayer's pocket through mob-style schemes turns into a kind of permanent shadow tax, used to maintain the corruption and keep the thieves in place. And that cuts right to the heart of what this case is all about. Wall Street is tired of making money by competing for business and weathering the vagaries of the market. What it wants instead is something more like the deal the government has – regularly collecting guaranteed taxes.