RALL CON’T was shown again on Sept. 23, when police used orange plastic nets to “kettle” and arrest about 80 Occupy Wall Streeters who had been marching peacefully through Greenwich Village. According to numerous witnesses and media accounts, none resisted. Cops went wild, beating several men bloody and macing at least one woman after she had been cuffed. Sadly too many people will look at the YouTube videos and say to themselves: I’m willing to suffer for a cause, not a scene. In July, Adbusters wanted the “one simple demand” to be “that Barack Obama ordain a presidential commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.” What do we want? A bipartisan blueribbon commission to study campaign finance reform! When do we want it? When the committee completes its work! That uninspiring demand has been set aside in favor of something hardly worth taking a rubber bullet for: “a vague but certain notion that the richest percentile of the country remains fat and happy as the goingon-5-year-old recession continues to batter the middle and working class,” as The New York 7
Observer put it. They should have demanded something majestic, reasonable and unobtainable. Like the nationalization of all corporations or the abolition of securities exchanges. The aggregated wealth of the superrich has been stolen from the rest of us. We should not ask them to give some of it back. We should take it all, then jail them. Rich people are bad people. Someone has to say it out loud. Street demonstrations have always relied on a sense of menace. The rich and powerful never relinquish prerogatives voluntarily. Only violence or the credible threat of violence can force them to give up what they stole. Despite the protesters’ many missteps, which were inevitable due to their lack of experience and political seasoning, the Occupy Wall Streeters should be commended. Sure, they did some stupid things. But they have taken a first step into history. See you in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 6, when the October2011.org coalition will begin the occupation of Freedom Square near the White House. Our demand is simple: We will not leave until the last occupation soldier and mercenary is withdrawn from U.S.-occupied Afghanistan.
CITIZEN CON’T and outs … I was given information from this person and then because my name was in the newspaper [in a 2005 article in Forbes], I was given information from the U.K., I was getting it from Japan … I pretty much was the one that kept at it and held it together and got the information. 10
So, you got together with other people who had been defrauded and you all sent information directly to the FBI? No, I became the contact person for the FBI and worked directly with them and they sent all the information from me. They check people out and they checked me out and found out the worst I’ve ever had is a parking ticket. Well, I’ve had speeding tickets, too. Quite a few. But it didn’t damage my credibility with the FBI. They came to admire the fact that I knew as much as I did, and they told me they could’ve never solved the case without me. What was the final kicker that got these guys put in prison? [Cope] got involved in another Ponzi scheme while he was under indictment for this one. He talked to the prosecuting attorney—because he wasn’t supposed to leave Arizona—he talked him into letting him go to California to help his son move, and they started another Ponzi scheme … I called the attorney general and said, “Do you know about this?” They knew about it and didn’t have him in jail. I said, “This man needs to be in jail.” And they finally put him in jail after he’d been out for almost eight years.
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When did he go to jail? We got him actually sentenced in 2009, so it was just a few months before that. How long is his sentence? He got seven years, which is not very much. How much were investors defrauded for? The information I have from my deepthroat source is they probably got over $100 million internationally. In our group, there were probably 40 people, and if you have 10 groups of that, maybe 400 people? Do you feel like the perception of whitecollar crime has changed since the Bernie Madoff scandal broke? Yeah … few people knew about Ponzi schemes before Bernie Madoff … But Ponzi schemes since then have gone up over 300 percent. In fact, one in 18 Americans was defrauded last year. How has that experience changed you, and how has that manifested in your book? What I recognized is that I used all of the tactics that I learned to pull myself out of the murders and the divorce [to] make myself healthy again. One of the reasons I could do what I did in this Ponzi scheme is because I knew the tools; I knew what to do. I would not let myself go into victim [mode]. I have a choice of whether I remain a victim of this or whether I become victorious over it. A lot of people don’t realize when something like this happens that they actually have a choice. WWW. B O I S E WE E KLY. C O M