Mr. Ng’s lawyers have attacked Mr. Leissner’s credibility, calling him a two-time bigamist — a description that Mr. Leissner acknowledged was true.

Now see that’s the part I’ll never understand. You’re running a vast, multi-million dollar criminal enterprise against the United States government. If you get caught, the prospect of your ever getting out of jail is dim. And yet when some entity at some point in your complex shakedown process refuses payment, YOU SUE THEM.

Does it not occur to you that it would be better to take this or that secondary loss and keep your head down?

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

Reminds UD of MIT’s sainted Dean Gabriel Bitran. He had a great criminal enterprise going until he and his son CONTACTED THE SEC.

The scheme was uncovered by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission when, while investigating potential victims of the Bernie Madoff fraud, SEC officials asked for documentation to support the Bitrans’ returns claims. The Bitrans then made false statements to the SEC examiners and provided fabricated records.

Ja, ja, the common thread here is mindless bottomless promiscuous depraved and degenerate GREED. I get it. Not one cent that you’ve earned through unnecessary surgeries or investor swindling must be allowed to slip through your hands. And by the way if Madoff money is being handed out, you’re damned well going to get some. Etc.

The criminal mind certainly has its … caesuras. I mean, no one is perfect – I get that, too – but you’d think veteran villains would avoid making unforced errors.

It’s hard to put the big guys away (just ask John Hammergren), but they did just get Laurence Doud, and that ain’t chopped opioids.

He got the pharmacist award the same year he was indicted, which means that the Pharmacists Society has now had, uh, five years to stop boasting about him.

The criteria for this award is very selective and discerning… He has provided creativity, innovation, and moral support for decades to his true passion: pharmacy. Doud also received an Honorary Doctorate from Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Science in 2016.

That’s six years the Albany College has had to mull its decision to honor CEO Inmate Number One.

Les Suissérables

There’s a grief that can’t be spoken
There’s a pain goes on and on
Empty jets and covid breaches
Now António’s dead and gone

He diverted to the Maldives

Just to have some harmless fun
And the bank paid for the Cessna
Which is — just the way it’s done…

But then nasty jealous voices

Spilled the beans on Chairman Tón
They objected to his privilege
And his seats at Wimbledon

I can hear his weeping now!

The very rules that he had broken
Became his last communion
On his final private flight
At dawn

‘Credit Suisse, oh Suisse, forgive me
That I drained you and am done
There’s much more I could have taken
But those dreams are dead and gone’

Phantom pilots at the cockpit
Phantom stewards at the door
Empty seats on empty Cessnas
Where António sits no more

The brazen, inexhaustible nature and variety of his mendacity is something to see. When you read what he does and says, having been caught making up numbers for Temple University’s business school in order to score a US News number one ranking, you have to admire the sheer endurance/agility/creativity of his lying.

When caught by Temple administrators, he simply says Give me more time. I can fix it back. Now in a court of law, he has blamed all of his assistants, who turn out to be vicious prevaricating scum, for the wrongdoing.

For sure, his next move will be to announce to the court that he is profoundly mentally and physically ill, cannot be held responsible for anything he’s ever done, and needs to go home and lie down.

In this 2010 photograph, entrepreneur Shawn Baldwin, 2015 recipient of the Boy Scouts of America Whitney M. Young Jr. Service Award, stands next to Michael Milken. Milken was sentenced to ten years and fined 600 mill for violating securities laws, while Baldwin was just sentenced to seventeen years for doing a Bernie Madoff.

UD thinks it’s always nice to get a sense of the real people behind these posed, expensive suit, MBA-type photos…. I mean, who are these people, really? Once you get to know them, they’re just like you and me!

Yeah I know but if you read it alongside this article, a mere babe at twenty-four minutes old, it spices up somewhat the dully predictable guilty sentence that America’s own Jay Gatsby – John Wilson, Harvard MBA – just received for bribing people and lying through his teeth to get not one, not two, but THREE of his rich, dim, klutzy spawn into fancy universities. Because Wilson himself is no stranger to … uh…

Says he played football at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. No record of it.

‘[S]ales quadrupled during Wilson’s tenure [at Staples, but] did not come close to the “10X” growth he touts. Over the same period, net income increased by 481 percent, according to the securities filing, not 800 percent.’

‘Wilson claims in his online resume that his success at Staples led him to be “selected by CFO magazine in 1994 as one of the Top 50 CFOs in the United States.” The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Vincent Ryan, was unable to find any record of Wilson’s recognition in the publication’s archive.’

Getting tired of quoting. There’s more.

No. Duh.

But it still will, of course.

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

And then there’s the federal government:

“McKinsey’s abhorrent conduct also demands that Congress consider broader action. McKinsey earns billions of dollars from contracts with the federal government. No firm that proposes paying kickbacks for overdose deaths should receive a single cent from U.S. taxpayers.”

Massively fatal drug distribution, to alter the quotation slightly, been berry, berry good to John Hammergren, whose rancid immorality has been cleaned up nice and good by outfits like CSIS, which allowed him to buy his way onto its board of trustees.

Every now and then an article appears that brings back the beautiful Hammergren way of life, in which you direct floods of killing substances into clueless hollers in West Virginia and suck up hundreds of millions of dollars for yourself while everyone dies and entire municipalities wither.

Yesterday’s New York Times told of a recommendation by the consultancy McKinsey that Purdue (Hammergren’s now-notorious supplier) keep the drugs flowing like crazy, and its distributors happy, by handing them cash whenever someone in their distribution territory overdosed. Overdoses after all are so… awkward. So unpleasant. So… actionable? I mean, a lot of these people die. Some of them have very compellingly grieving mothers who talk to newspapers and attorneys and all.

It’s the old drug dealer problem: You want addicts of course, cuz that’s where your big reliable bucks come from; but you don’t want dead or spasming or frothing at the mouth or almost dead addicts. You want nice functional non-deadbeat addicts. McKinsey’s solution to growing numbers of dead and dying addicts that might make the distributors… uncomfortable… is to compensate them for each and every OD. A good faith gesture:

If you’re a pharmaceutical-company CEO who is making an opioid that is killing people, you already know it’s a problem, and you already have a pretty good idea of how you have to handle it. You hire a firm like McKinsey, in this hypothetical scenario, to make it look as if you’re not the one coming up with the unsavory options. It gives you some numbers and some options on paper (actually, at least traditionally, a hardbound blue book). It also gives you plausible deniability. “I didn’t come up with this idea, Your Honor. It was the consultants!”

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

“How do the C.E.O.s of these companies sleep at night?” Bob Ferguson, Washington’s attorney general, said at a recent news conference.

Sleep at night? John Hammergren, from his CSIS perch, is currently handing out how-to-stay-healthy tips to the American public. Take long walks, try the Mediterranean diet, and cram twenty oxys a day down your gullet.

… dark covid days (altering a Joni Mitchell phrase here), the Economist promises many corporate scandals once they’re over.

As with their private jet–aided appeals to lower emissions, the 1 percent’s virtue signaling about social distancing during this outbreak obscures the fact that they’ve helped make the crisis worse. Even starved of their chefs and personal shoppers, the rich might be able to weather Covid-19 in their summer homes. Their worldview, on the other hand, may not be so lucky—and could face an angrier, more organized public on the other side.

The Before and After; the Hi Di High and the Hi Di Low; the Mother-Teresa-to-Maserati in Ten Seconds Flat… You gotta get a kick out of this recent article about CEO of the Month Larry Gerrans, who

considers Mother Teresa as the person whose life contribution is the most inspirational, because of how selfless and pure of intention she was.

Larry — now, er, formalized in court papers to Lawrence —

has been convicted of wire fraud and money laundering for “siphoning millions of dollars” from his company to buy a $2.6 million home, a diamond ring and a Maserati, federal prosecutors said.

LOL. ME LIKE!

When one of your most ruthless traders turns out to steal pretty much everything he encounters in his daily life, he is displaying exactly the grasping arrogant psychopathology you’re after. Despite his millions in compensation, he finds nothing too small to steal – bike parts, commuter train tickets… and now, cafeteria food. The boy can’t help it.

The response to this compulsion is not oooh you’re immoral and we’re a saintly hedge fund so satan get thee hence. The proper response is a nice fat bonus.

... (scroll down; read the whole page) you’d be SO not surprised at the Jeffrey Epstein story! Boys’ clubs will be boys’ clubs – they’ll ignore bad boys forever cuz they kinda like them.

 Once upon a time there was a business
Where we used to raise a price or two
Remember how we settled suits for peanuts
And dreamed up all the dirty deals we'd do

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end

Inflation schemes, price fixing, bribery
We'd gut the lives we'd choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were rich and sure to have our way

 Now generic prices are in tatters
For distribution too we'll have to pay 
Our current debt load's twenty seven billion
Ruefully we smile and weep and say  

Yes I remember well

We were corrupt as hell

And now our smiles have all turned into frowns.

But then you take my hand and tell me Here's the plan

We're gonna take our cash and double-down