America’s modern Minutemen.

The directive has gone out: The name must be removed from all Kennedy Center communications.

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 Washington University! Maybe she explained Melville’s 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. Plenty of respectable people call for the legalization of insider trading. Expect the raft of defense lawyers for these thirty or so defendants to ridicule the absurdity of criminalizing the act of stealing and monetizing private information.

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A thoughtful article in Tikkun about the criminal propensities of Orthodox Jews. (You need to register to read the whole thing, but the first paragraphs alone are worth a read.)

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.

Auctioned off at a pathetic thirteen million from an original asking price of $50 million — if this doesn’t fit the definition of Aristotelian tragedy, I don’t know what does.

We’re almost there, mes petites! We’re THAT close to arriving at Tom Lehrer’s lines!

‘Leaked Plans Show Pentagon Eyeing Louisiana to Deploy National Guard‘

We’re only one state over. Ne quittez pas.

UD ain’t a huge fan of Jane Fonda, but her response to the dainty NPR interviewer who referred to Fonda’s mother having “passed away” is so wonderful.

UD ain’t a huge fan of psychotherapy, but when Fonda said she has started going again to “figure out why I’m not a better person,” UD also found that wonderful.

Taking a page from Diddy’s book, this bigtime thief announces he’s now all about “intense religious study, community service and therapy,” so he should only suffer a touch of probation rather than the heavy jail time he richly deserves.

“Schwartz’s greed was boundless.” US District Attorney, Georgia.

And as to whether, day after tomorrow, he’ll actually get his ass out of his 19 million dollar penthouse, what do you think? A liar who has reneged on every promise he ever made… Leave? Not leave? Cough up those daily contempt fines? Hm… hm… “Even though it was put on the market last year for $19M, attorneys … wrote in bankruptcy court filings that Schwartz, his wife and children continued to live there, preventing any genuine attempts at a sale. It has since been taken off the market.”

“He never closed on [promised business] deals and instead drained roughly $54M from [clients] to spend on personal expenses, luxury watches.” One of the watches was a $120K Grönefeld 1941 Remontoire.

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UPDATE: Schwartz, the Brooklyn-born real estate investor, had more than a dozen supporters in the courtroom, who let out a gasp when [the judge] issued [a] seven-year, three-month sentence.

GASP — A person who stole 54 million dollars GETS PRISON TIME???

… (it’s long since over, the murderer put away for life) features the testimony of Cynthica Schulz, a lost soul who has lived rough for the last six years, and who believes cell phones are poisoning her.

Despite her mental frailty, she was a sharp and articulate witness — before she fell apart, she was a school teacher in California.

Schulz lives alone in a remote state park sometimes, and she had the terrible misfortune of discovering the murder victim in one of them. More trauma for an already traumatized person.

To which we can add giving lengthy testimony about the body. She wept quietly throughout.

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But okay here’s what got to UD.

As Schulz took the stand, the judge said We know you have difficulty with certain devices, so I’ve already asked everyone in the room to turn phones, etc., off, and I’m repeating that request now for anyone who didn’t hear my earlier request. Please everyone turn all your devices off. Thank you. We can proceed.

Schulz thanked her, and UD teared up, thinking about human vulnerability and human kindness.

Another feather in Wharton’s financial criminals hat!

Background on this remarkable school here.

The Forbes 30 Under 30 list has become a meme in the past few years as a few of the honorees have found themselves indicted on fraud. The Forbes-to-Fraud pipeline includes FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, co-CEO of Alameda Research; fintech Frank founder Charlie Javice; and “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli.

Add Joanna Smith-Griffin.

… IUD.

… whose masturbation of her partner in a public theater is the kind of civic activity we need to see more of if we are going to avoid the coming demographic disaster.

Bobert has inspired the movement’s new slogan – IT’S THE HANDJOBBERY, STUPID! – which has begun appearing on t shirts and bumper stickers as the pronatalists seek to draw Americans’ attention to quick and easy steps toward insemination.

[O]n Wednesday, the Brevard County [Florida] school board held a meeting, in part to discuss a challenge to the books The Kite Runner and Slaughterhouse-Five. Only one Moms for Liberty member showed up.

All the other attendees spoke in favor of keeping the books on the shelves—and heavily criticized the parental rights organization. One attendee compared “the growth of the Taliban and its repressive autocracy in the name of religious nationalism” in The Kite Runner to “the rise of parental rights groups that want to limit what students learn.”

Sixteen percent of its directors have been crooks. During the glory years (2004 – 2011) they went from Rodrigo Rato, soon to start another jail term, to Dominique Strauss Kahn.

Has the IMF ever issued a statement distancing itself from its mafia? UD doesn’t think so. Why not?

Has Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, which long touted Rato’s having graduated from the school, ever issued any kind of statement acknowledging his crimes? Again, UD doesn’t think so. All over the web you can find them praising their Frankenstein. Don’t you think the school should say something official? Or maybe it doesn’t care.