In honor of history’s biggest tax evader, Jesse Jones has renamed itself The Jesse James School!
As Fran Lebowitz notes, you earn a million; you steal a billion. And the honorable Robert Brockman has devoted his life to demonstrating the truth of that statement, hiding record-setting billions in Switzerland and other fabled havens. Sudden-onset dementia unfortunately gripped the man the moment the indictment came down, and now he’s apparently staggering around trying to find his ass with two hands. Forget finding the money. What money. Let the man die in dignity.
The 39-count indictment includes wire fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, and destruction of evidence, among other charges. These crimes make up a nearly 20-year plot to conceal income in offshore accounts.
He sat on lots of university boards, and while some, like the Baylor School of Medicine, seem to have gotten out in front of the story (speaking of which, lucky Centre College! The whole school might well have been renamed for the world’s biggest white collar criminal.), Jesse James still has his big-shot page up.
Brockman, known for being rather reclusive (wonder why), also gives big money to Ted Cruz and Rick Perry. His name is as prominently plastered on Rice campus buildings as the name Kapoor is at Binghamton, Wyly at Michigan, and Kozlowski and Brennan at Seton Hall.
The Brockman Hall for Opera stands next to the existing Alice Pratt Brown Hall, forming the Brockman Music and Performing Center. Additionally, in 2011, President David Leebron and Rice Board of Trustees Chair Jim Crownover thanked the A. Eugene Brockman Charitable Trust for its centennial gift at the unveiling of the Brockman Hall for Physics.
There’s a poignancy to all those music halls, because if Brockman’s co-conspirator hadn’t sung so loudly to the Justice Department he wouldn’t be going to jail.
Some world, huh? A notorious, spectacular, criminal cavorts about doing his thing for decades during which plenty of people squawk about him (just like they squawked about Yeshiva University treasurer Bernie Madoff!) but nothing happens except that he sits on high-profile university boards and has his name emblazoned for the ages on university buildings.