October 24th, 2021
Correction of the Day

An earlier version of this article misstated the losses from online card fraud in 2019. It was about $6 billion, not about $6 million.

October 14th, 2021
Can you put an entire university in receivership?

The University of Southern California is colossally corrupt. It’s corrupt almost everywhere: In its athletics program (I’d name names, but there are too many); in its med school (Puliafito; Varma; Tyndall); in its admissions system (Varsity Blues); on its board of trustees (Barrack), and now in its school of social work. (Click on my first link for details on all of these instances.) It has succeeded in attaining Yeshiva University levels of corruption.

You have to pay close attention to understand the massive social work school corruption – here’s a good, detailed description of it – but know that the person allegedly engineering the scheme was the dean of the school, a woman desperately greedy for money after she apparently mismanaged the school to a huge deficit. She and the local politician she bribed in exchange for lucrative contracts are currently under federal indictment.

And here’s the real beauty of it, given USC’s perennial, and, most recently, one billion dollar, problem with sexual harassment: The dean arranged the quick hiring onto her faculty of the politician’s son – even got the entirely unqualified dude a professorship! – although the guy only needed a job because he was about to be charged with sexual harassment at his current job.

The politician is “a graduate of the university, from which he received a doctorate in social ethics,” and yes, you cannot make this shit up.

October 9th, 2021
Update, Czech Election

See this post for background on PM Babis, undone by what came flying out of Pandora’s box. For indeed he has lost an election that was his to win, simply because he seems to be a grasping lying motherfucker.

But God never closes a door without opening a window. Babis’ consolation prize is his $22 million Château Bigdick or Bigaud or something which here’s the entrance and I hear tell it’s got the pool and the palms and everything a bounced Czech might need to make him feel a mite better.

October 5th, 2021
Heartland Values = $360 billion

SOUTH! Dakota! Where the trusts come right behind the gains

Where within the wheat our banks secrete

All your dirty money on the plains!

SOUTH! Dakota! Every night my narco boss and me

Contemplate in awe the way our law

Gives us narco-perpetuity!

We know what we’re doing is banned

Except in this wonderful land!

So when we say… Yeeow! Aye-yip-aye-yo-ee-ay!

We’re only sayin You piece o’ shit South Dakota

South Dakota okay!

October 4th, 2021
UD comments on a couple of the Pandora Papers…

… revelations.

Several members of Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s inner circle, including current and former cabinet ministers, “secretly owned an array of companies and trusts holding millions of dollars of hidden wealth,” the group reported. That could create a political headache for the former cricket star, who campaigned for the South Asian country’s highest office as the head of a reformist party that promised a strong anti-corruption agenda.

By Pakistani standards, this IS anti-corruption.

*************************

Jordan’s monarch, King Abdullah II, used an English accountant in Switzerland and lawyers in the British Virgin Islands to secretly purchase 14 luxury homes worth $106 million, including a $23 million property in California overlooking a beach, the ICIJ reported, noting the country relies on foreign aid to support its people and house millions of refugees. U.K. attorneys for the king told the ICIJ that he was not required to pay taxes under Jordanian law, has never misused public funds and has “security and privacy reasons to hold property through offshore companies.” 

“If you ever want to see your children alive again, you must purchase fourteen luxury homes worth one hundred million dollars.”

***********************

September 19th, 2021
Double your pleasure/Double your fun/With Doub-Admit, Doub-Admit, Doub-Admit Sum!

[John] Wilson, who heads a Massachusetts private equity firm, is charged with paying … $1 million to buy his twin daughters’ ways into Harvard and Stanford.

September 9th, 2021
Available In and Out of Store!

Ippolito, a licensed pharmacist and owner of Northgate Pharmacy in Waldorf, and Shifflett, an employee at the pharmacy, were indicted by a Charles County Grand Jury in August. Ippolito distributed narcotics to an undercover officer and Shifflett was conducting street deals of pharmaceutical controlled substances that she obtained from the pharmacy.

September 5th, 2021
Bada Boom Bada Bling: Another High-Ranking Administrator Steals Millions For Over a Decade from a University that should have Known Better.

Maybe when your endowment’s $31.2 billion you don’t give a rat’s ass when someone steals a measly – I dunno – thirty million; but Yale might at least have thought of the embarrassment when this hit the press.

Yale law professor Kate Stith, who previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said that she prosecuted many similar cases of money laundering and mail and wire fraud, though she could not recall one on such a large scale because of how long Petrone-Codrington’s scheme went undetected. “One naturally asks: Where were Yale’s accountants and compliance officers?”

I mean, she was at this for eight to ten years.

And yes, yes – UD has long pledged not to bother blogging about these stories, since they’re as common as domestic slaughter with AK-47s… but this one has an interesting wrinkle, something UD discovered in doing a quick background check on the irreproducibly named JAMIE PETRONE-CODRINGTON. Jane Smith I wouldn’t have bothered with; but a name like Jamie P-C will yield only the best results.

And there you are. She is or was married to a semi-famous boxer! If I’m not mistaken.

“The Don’s” loss to Allan Green earned Green the 2005 knockout of the year award.

**********************

She split the purchases into orders below $10,000 so they did not require additional approval by her supervisors.

So that means she must have filed – what – 17 billion orders? And the system was that no one at Yale University saw any records of her purchases? Come again?

So this is where the mind naturally goes to a conspiracy. Who else at Yale Med School knew about/covered up the crime?

May 15th, 2021
But we wouldn’t want to raise taxes on this demographic.

Listing agent Dan Dockray of LIV Sotheby’s International Realty said [Tom Cruise’s $39.5 million Telluride Colorado] property was actually in contract within roughly the first week. “It all really depended on who had their Gulfstream warming up on the tarmac to get out there first,” said his colleague Eric Lavey, who also worked on the deal.

April 3rd, 2020
I’m not surprised. How can I be surprised? I read Laurie Garrett’s Immensely Long The Coming Plague in Hardback, Page by Page, in 1994, Right After it Came Out.

That book totally, successfully, got through to me.

What does surprise me – and will never stop surprising me – are the hoarding/gouging operations, like Baruch Feldheim’s. New York Hospitals Rationing Ventilators, Retrofitting Equipment, headline the local papers, as the morgues overflow; and here’s a son of New York who can watch the horror every day from his front window and jack up prices 700% on illegally held life-saving gear. Just wow.

January 24th, 2020
Ya gotta admit:

It makes for GREAT viewing. And this is only the teaser!!!!

Background here.

July 21st, 2019
While the grotesque John Hammergren…

… (details here) retires from his drug distribution days to the life of a highly respectable billionaire, ordinary dumbshit drug distributors in the state he helped destroy – West Virginia – go to jail. Let’s put the big drug capo next to the little drug capolinis, okay?

In a species of hypocrisy too grotesque even to laugh at, Hammergren, for years the CEO behind McKesson’s opioid carpet bombing of the US, currently heads up a task force on women’s health at the Center for Strategic and International Stupefacients (of which he is also a trustee; enjoy his written-by-someone-stoned-out-of-her-mind biography here). He ran one of America’s dirtiest businesses, and his personal greed is a national disgrace, but CSIS just loves them some Hammergren money and they don’t give a shit about those dead people cuz they wanna help people, see? You follow?

No other corporation distributed more opioids in those years than Hammergren’s McKesson … Over his first 16 years as CEO, notes Bloomberg, Hammergren pocketed $781 million. His final months in the McKesson chief executive suite brought that total near $800 million. Upon his retirement, he walked away with a pension package worth $138.6 million.” When the rewards for addicting much of the nation get this high, you do not go to jail, mes petites; you make high-level decisions about women’s health.

So here’s John with probably more personal real estate than even Jeffrey Epstein, telling those American women who happened to survive his carpet bombing how to stay in tiptop shape … and here’s a couple of West Virginians – Samuel R. Ballengee and Devonna Miller-West – who saw the amazing business potential of opioids just as clearly as Hammergren but lacked his resources and connections. What happened to them?

They’ve landed where Hammergren never will – on a federal indictment for drug distribution. They’re both the sort of jerks who will end up going to jail rather than advising UD on how to keep her cholesterol low through the liberal application of OxyContin. Ballengee, once a pharmacist, and indeed a McKesson distributor until CBS aired a report about his pharmacy and McKesson went and got cold feet, got so pissed at CBS for ruining his business that he sued them for fifteen million dollars! That must seem like a lot to Ballengee, though Hammergren makes that much every time he takes a dump.

Anyway, a judge totally dismissed the lawsuit totally immediately (“These broadcasts were not only tolerable—they were applaudable... The people of West Virginia, indeed those all over the country, deserve to know about the evolution of the opioid epidemic and the identities of the bad actors.”), and now Ballengee’s unemployed, owes lawyers money, is the object of a bunch of civil suits from I guess survivors of overdosed customers, and has been named in a federal indictment. Loser.

Miller-West is similarly pitiable. She shares Hammergren’s tireless drug-entrepreneurship energy – she owned (still owns?) not only a pharmacy, but also Alternative Healing and Coalfield Cannabis (admiring local news article here) – but she too finds herself on the federal indictment.

July 12th, 2019
‘Epstein Paid $350,000 to Tamper With Witnesses, Prosecutors Say’

Sing it.

**********

His friend Ghislaine

Is talking to the men.

His friend Ghislaine

Wants to avoid the pen.

And where’s that nasty pen?

Darkest Tenn.! Darkest Tenn.!

And if you are Ghislaine

What then? What then?

… In Hartford, Harrington, and Hampshire

Sex trafficking hardly ever happens…

His friend Ghislaine…

July 12th, 2019
Acosta Resigns.

Good. Because it’s really hard to rhyme “Acosta.”

*******************

OTOH. UD thinks we’re moving to Caligula too fast. It’s possible Epstein will bring down the presidency or screw up re-election, but you’ve got to pace these things, and it’s only counterproductive to go to Caligula at this point.

Thus sprachs Michelle Goldberg’s headline in the NYT, but UD needs to insist that however “depraved” (Goldberg’s word, and I’m fine with it) this administration is, until it forces every woman on the White House staff to strip and prostitute herself with a stallion in the Oval Office, it’s not really in Caligula’s league. Rather, if you want to characterize what Trump has brought into the White House, go here, to a 2014 secret party of the one percenter boys; or (in its Early Years manifestation), recall the Duke lacrosse boys ordering strippers in for the evening. This isn’t the culture of Caligula; it’s about money crimes, woman abuse, and drinking. The only two obviously crazy people in this world are super-sanctimonious, totally blind VP Pence, and I Kept my Underpants On, Mommy! Alan Dershowitz. Neither seems capable of Caligulan behavior, but both are certainly as batty as the “little boot”; and while the unhinged Dershowitz is well on his way to permanent nervous breakdown, we do need to worry about Mad Mike assuming the throne.

Anyway, all UD is saying is cool your jets. All things come to those who wait.

July 11th, 2019
Bail Conditions, Rockefeller University Trustee Emeritus Epstein

‘Jeffrey Epstein’s attorneys submitted a bail package proposal on Thursday in which he volunteered to go under house arrest at his Manhattan mansion—with a “trustee” who would live with him and make sure he doesn’t break any rules. [Finally a chance to get to know Ghislaine!] … [If] he’s released and put on home confinement, he would agree to wear a GPS tracking device on his ankle, install surveillance cameras, and ground his jet. [Stands for Girls Prepube Essent!]’

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