UD used to cover insider trading stories, especially when the insiders also sat on university boards of trustees. Yeshiva University – Land o’ Madoff – was the most brazen offender – not only with insider trading, but with pretty much any other form of malfeasance available to it.

And now here’s a really massive insider trading story featuring Yeshiva grads – and other orthodox and less orthodox members of UD’s tribe – stealing confidential M and A information from all over town and selling it.

One wee example of how it went down:

[A cooperating witness] was staffed on the Enstar deal because his firm was advising Sixth Street on its roughly $5 billion acquisition of Enstar. He shared news of the deal with his former [college] classmates, who told him a few days later they had purchased between $2 million and $3 million in Enstar shares. After the deal was announced, [the witness] was allegedly due a $30,000 kickback…

More broadly:

[The ringleaders] [who met at UD’s George’s Washington University! Maybe she explained The Confidence Man to them and got the ball rolling] recruited attorneys with access to confidential information at elite firms, paid them kickbacks of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, and then fed those tips through a layered network of traders and middlemen who placed trades ahead of nearly 30 public merger announcements, using burner phones, encrypted apps, and coded language, including referring to tips as airline “flights” and upcoming deal announcements as dates when a “rabbi” was scheduled for surgery. The whole thing generated tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits and is one of the largest insider trading cases charged in years.

If you’re an antisemite looking for your very own actual Jewish conspiracy, you’ve come to the right place! The godly even used pious rabbinical language to encode their nefarious texts… which they clearly figured were securely encrypted but gevalt.

All their yiddishisms now appear on the DOJ website.

As for why detection took so long … Yeshiva’s BOT treasurer (Bernie, that is) had a good long run too before they caught him. I’m sure there are people in this current case, like Harry Markopolos in regard to Madoff, who’ve been telling anyone who will listen about the insider conspiracy, but eh. American capitalism’s riding high at the moment. Very little interest in falling off the horse.

Here’s what that failure looks like on the street.

Lynne Cooke-Case allegedly threatened [her neighbors with a firearm,] saying she would “put (the gun) in the mouth of anyone who got in [her] way.”… Cooke-Case’s dogs [then] killed a neighbor’s chicken and she [started] firing a gun from the road while threatening people… Cooke-Case fired about 20 rounds into the air. According to court documents, Cooke-Case also claimed there were bombs inside her home, and troopers reported a strong odor of gunpowder inside.

Insane people have no trouble getting guns in NH; and here is an example of how they use them.

People are overlooking a sad American retirement story that should by all rights dominate our headlines. But perhaps we just don’t care anymore.

There’s a growing trend of older homeowners unable to sell their investment properties as they attempt to downsize later in life. Dan Snyder, for example, lowered and lowered the price of his house along the Potomac River until he was forced to give up. He ultimately made it a charitable gift to the American Cancer Society, which was in turn for years unable to sell it, until in desperation they auctioned it off for 9 million (original price 50 million).

Now Bill Koch can’t unload his house in Aspen, which for over a decade, with multiple price reductions, has failed to sell. Koch started at 100 million, then 80. Then, regaining hope, he listed it for 125 million. Then, despairing again, he asked 99 million.

As Tuli Kupferberg would put it NOTHING. NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING! By way even of a nibble.

This home too will now go to the ignominy of auction.

A Birmingham judge so hilariously corrupt, incompetent, and racist that she managed to get indefinite suspension even in one of our most corrupt states, continues to smile down from her official probate court page.

An extensive reading of her case yields the thought that she simply went mad with power, enjoying – it seems – the thought of suffering people waiting for her decisions before they could be released from mental institutions and other forms of hell. Walking her dogs routinely took precedence over appearing in court and doing her job, much of which involved sick and vindictive plots against people she didn’t like. Like white people.

SOS says: Virtually all style guides prefer administering to administrating. Stick with administering.

Or, as a headline expressing the absurdity of trying to name the place Trump/Kennedy has it, COURT SAYS TRUMP CAN’T NAME THE KENNEDY CENTER AFTER HIMSELF.

Plastering over the name of a man whose death convulsed the country. Muscling aside the memorializing of national tragedy for the sake of juvenile conceit. It was too disgusting for a judge not to notice.

As long as the United States has a legitimate judiciary, we can hope for more outcomes like this.

UD will make every effort to be there to record the sandblasting of the name Trump.

Nothing remotely like it will happen; but of course Deresiewicz is right. Some humanities professors should be encouraged to write lively art criticism, for instance, in the sort of places that have a bit of a profile and some actual readers. But the unread hyperspecialized stuff should end.

It won’t.

Two of their football heroes got drunk and started screaming at each other in a Dewey Beach parking lot. At 3 AM.

One’s a thief.

Both lied about their identities.

Police said both suspects attempted to flee on foot as officers continued their investigation. During the attempted detention, a struggle broke out and one suspect allegedly interfered with officers trying to take the other into custody. Officers reported that one suspect was stopped after a Taser was deployed, while the second continued resisting arrest before being restrained with assistance from a bystander. Both were charged with disorderly conduct, felony resisting arrest with force or violence, offensive touching of a law enforcement officer, providing false information to police, and two counts of underage possession or consumption of alcohol.

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

And this one was just a few days ago. Poor Whitman.

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

UD thanks her sister for the link.

Sierra Leone’s First Lady says YES!!! to clit-stripping. Almost every little girl in that country is held down and castrated by village butchers and Jabbe-Bio couldn’t be more proud.

Good summary of our focus here at University Diaries over the years. It’s from Theo Baker, whose book provides useful Stanford University orientation materials.

UD’s loving the Spy Who Came in with the Gold – a real pot boiler, destined to become a classic of its type.

How did the mysterious self-fabricator David Rush gain entry to the CIA in the first place, much less be promoted to a senior agency position? How did he – like the pyramid-building Egyptians; like the Moia-mounting Easter Islanders – move thousands of gold bars into his suburban Virginia manse? An enigma for the ages.

Like David himself. Like the super well-endowed federal agency that fed him the bullion while he fed it the bull.

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

And these are only the opening chapters. Where do we go from here? UD is panting to know. Certain incipient plot lines are obvious – his explanation that he had a debilitating gambling addiction, frinstance… Was he clever enough NOT to buy seven Aston Martins in order to avoid suspicion? We’ve heard not a peep about his car collection.

Did a Russki kleptocrat on orders from Putin set the whole thing up?

Is it good for the Jews?

He’s not quite comfortable looking straight at the mug shot camera, but then he’s used to cloak and dagger. His dark identity needs to be carefully protected, along with the reason why, as a high-ranking CIA officer, he stole forty million dollars worth of gold bars, courtesy of your federal taxes.

Oh – also oodles of foreign currency, and “three dozen luxury watches, many of them Rolexes.”

He lied to the CIA about pretty much everything, including his extensive, totally made up, education. And was rewarded with a senior position that lasted decades. What gives? Is he a mole?

UD wonders if the current administration, faced with unbelievable negligence and stupidity at the highest level of American intelligence, will be able to blame it on an earlier administration.

A reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Ed offers a book-length interview with the curiouser and curiouser Dan Ariely – a Duke sociologist already outed as a likely research fraudster (sometimes with his buddy, the notorious F. Giro).

Ariely is now being … scrutinized because of his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, a friendship he talks about with the same idiocy/evasion as his other buddy, none other than Prince Andrew himself!

Okay, merely an acquaintance. They had tea together in a palace. But read the whole Ariely interview to see what a slightly smarter, slicker, Andrew would have said.

I think that we are developing very much a fear culture. I feel that given that I was in the Epstein files, I feel that I’m lucky that I’m a social scientist. If I were a physicist, I would just get the negative consequences. As a social scientist, I get to also learn something new about humanity. So every time somebody calls to wonder or to cancel or something, I have a discussion with them. And I try to understand what is going on. And my sense is that we are getting to be more of a culture that is driven by fear.

Driven by fear, or by disgust that amoral elites don’t give a shit about – or in the case of Andrew even seem to share – the vile sexual ethics of some of the super-rich? Fun as it is to receive lectures from Ariely about what cowards we are because we’re afraid to plagiarize or make stuff up or hang around with sick motherfuckers, UD thinks it’s better to keep the focus on people who plagiarize and make stuff up and hang around with sick motherfuckers.

La Kid was with friends in Adams Morgan. Not for the first time, I texted her with instructions about what streets to avoid in order not to get shot.

… Saturday nights will be SOOOO much less exciting.