Bernard Madoff was a Yeshiva University trustee… He was treasurer … But that’s old news.

Jeffrey Cohen is an Indiana University trustee… Chair of the board’s Finance and Audit Committee… His securities fraud charge is new news.

The school hasn’t taken his name off of its website.

Neither has Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, where he’s on the Board of Advisors.

He’s got lots of university board positions, huh?

Universities love big money boys on their boards, and who can blame them?

But there’s a big risk factor.

The Indianapolis office of securities firm Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. is facing charges that it improperly advised more than 100 Indiana clients to invest $54.9 million in a complex securities auction that later collapsed.

As a result, the investments have been frozen, and it is unclear whether the investors will be able to recover any of their money, despite being told the investment carried little or no risk and could be redeemed within weeks.

The firm is charged with securities fraud, failing to supervise and train employees, and selling unsuitable products, according to an administrative complaint filed Thursday by the Indiana secretary of state’s office.

Of the 141 people who invested, 92 were clients of Jeffrey Cohen, managing director of the office. Cohen is also a member of the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis board of advisers and a trustee for Park Tudor School.

According to the complaint, Cohen said he did not receive any special training on the securities in question, had no knowledge of auction failures and did not disclose any risks because “most of the clients in the real world don’t want to hear, you know, every single risk factor.”

He could not be reached for comment at his office…

A former chief financial officer at Hadassah is claiming that she had an affair with Bernard Madoff.

Sheryl Weinstein reportedly makes the claim in her book “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me,” which is set to be published Aug. 25 by St. Martin’s Press.

… The Jewish women’s organization has said that it invested $40 million with Madoff from 1988 to 1997.

… Weinstein served on the Hadassah committee that decided to invest with Madoff…

A new court document released yesterday reveals more details about Ezra Merkin’s lucrative non-management of money.

Non-profits – New York University, and, of course, Yeshiva University, which made him a trustee — especially admired his bundle-the-bucks-for-Bernie investment philosophy.

From the Canadian Jewish News:

… In his keynote address [at a Yeshiva event in Montreal recently], [Richard] Joel, who has been YU president since 2003, made an appeal for greater financial support from Montrealers, as well as for them to send more of their children to YU.

He said the university spends about $2.5 to $3 million a year educating those Montrealers, but receives only about $750,000 to $850,000 in revenue in any given year from Montreal.

“The economy is awful, and we are operating in a major deficit,” he added.

Joel did not refer to the $14.5 million YU has said it lost in the fraud allegedly perpetrated by Bernard Madoff, who was a member of its board of trustees…

As we await Madoff’s sentencing today, we revisit unapologetically ill-run Yeshiva University.

[Many institutions connected to Madoff] not only need to more formally organize their investing and giving along more official corporate governance lines — Yeshiva University in particular has been cited for this type of needed reform. [T]hey may need to address their own unwitting complicity in the dissipation of the assets of Mr. Madoff’s victims.

Madoff, recall, was Yeshiva’s treasurer, Ezra Merkin an influential trustee. There’s been no public reckoning with this history on that campus, and conflict of interest remains the all-male board of trustees’ middle name.

Sure, Yeshiva lost money through Madoff. It also made plenty of money – for itself, and for its trustees. Yeshiva has said nothing by way of acknowledgement of the depth of its misdeeds.

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Update: It’s also a good day to remember this letter, written last year to the president of Yeshiva from one of its law school graduates, Andrew Sole. Here are its closing paragraphs:

[H]arm has come to this distinguished University, both in financial loss and worse, in reputation. It is my view that the harm today is directly attributable to the failed performance of our trustees. As fiduciaries they lost sight of their primary mission, to safeguard the long-term interests of Yeshiva University. Whether their activities were merely negligent, or worse, that judgment is best left for others.

In my view it will take a generation to repair the damage inflicted upon Yeshiva. And that is very sad. But what would be even sadder, and which would also give grave concerns to Yeshiva’s many supporters, would be for the University to continue to allow the current Board of Trustees to serve as fiduciaries going forward.

The honorable course (and we have seen virtually no honorable behavior in American corporate boardrooms, nor in our public servants, in 2008) would be for the University’s President, and its legal counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell, to demand the immediate resignation of the entire Board of Trustees. The University’s counsel, government regulators, and law enforcement will conduct their proper investigations, but the proud students, graduates, and supporters of Yeshiva University should not have to wait that long for credible and therapeutic action to be taken by this University.

Yeshiva has the opportunity to begin the healing process today by installing new fiduciaries that are untainted by scandal and embarrassment. I hope you will take this letter to heart and I wish the University the best during these incredibly trying times.

Yeshiva responded to Sole with a form letter brush-off.

And all of those men, those hands-in-each-others’-pockets men, those Madoff and Merkin men, remain on the Yeshiva University board of trustees.

While [Ezra] Merkin faces an intense legal onslaught, he also must cope with a thorny situation at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue, where he serves as president and where his father was a co-founder. According to The Jewish Week, Mr. Merkin is slated to become chairman [Replacing Ira Rennert! Way non-stringent admissions criteria.] on Wednesday.

Although the title is largely ceremonial in most congregations, the promotion has infuriated at least some members, with one calling it “the height of chutzpah” for Mr. Merkin to stick around.

Two other [Canadian Madoff investors] were more puzzling – Herb and Ruth Gamberg, a pair of modest, left-leaning professors who came to Halifax in the 1960s and taught at Dalhousie University before they retired.

Mr. Gamberg, 75, is regarded as one of the world’s leading Marxist scholars, according to a documentary about his life under development by Halifax director Walter Forsyth. He grew up in Worcester, Mass., and on his trips home from Brandeis University he would play pickup basketball with his younger friend, Abbie Hoffman, the radical social activist who comprised part of the Chicago Seven. After coming to Canada, he helped establish the Foundation Year Program at King’s College, and became one of the early members of Dalhousie’s sociology department, writing on everything from prison reform to socialism to the history of Nova Scotia’s political left.

Although they are retired, the Gambergs remain politically energized. They added their names to a petition nominating folk singer Pete Seeger for a Nobel Peace Prize, and were among a group of signatories protesting Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama mining project in Chile.

The Gambergs could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Ruth’s work contributes to The Truth About the Cultural Revolution (see footnote 6).

… and so far I’ve come across one alumna of University Diaries — the dread Jane L. Dolkart. Let’s take a careful trip down Memory Lane…

On Wednesday, June 8, testimony began in the case of [Southern Methodist University] Dedman School of Law professor Jane L. Dolkart, accused of hitting bicyclist Tommy Thomas with her car in May 2004.

Less than a week later, a Dallas jury found Dolkart guilty of aggravated assault but decided not to sentence her to jail time, opting instead for a penance of five years of probation and two years of community service.

The jury, according to media representatives inside the courtroom, ‘determined that Dolkart intentionally struck … Thomas with her car at White Rock Lake.’

In his testimony, Officer Craig Bennight explained that when told of Mr. Thomas” original accusation, Dolkart said she ‘only meant to tap him.’

After investigating the details with his partner, Bennight said, ‘We both concurred there was no evidence it was an accident. Ms. Dolkart never said it was an accident.’

Though she and defense attorney Mike Gibson were able to avoid the maximum of 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, Dolkart still elicited strong emotions from bicyclists across the metroplex.

One avid cyclist, who asked to remain anonymous, remarked, ‘As we all know, a “tap” from a two-ton auto can kill. … If there is justice in this world, she should pay big time.’

But the penalty from the city of Dallas is only half of the price Dolkart can expect to pay. A member of the Washington, D.C. bar association, Ms. Dolkart”s future as an SMU professor is under investigation.

The day after Dolkart”s sentence was handed down, the University issued the following statement:

“SMU is aware of the jury”s decision in the case involving Professor Jane Dolkart. Under University policy, SMU will conduct an internal review of the situation to determine an appropriate course of action.’

Yeshiva University’s most honored benefactor (now that Bernard Madoff is no more) doesn’t just loot his polluting businesses to build the largest private home in America for himself; he also funds Israeli settlers. It has been a privilege, over many years, to follow the morbid disgusting ways of one of America’s great money obsessives, and to note the proud smiling faces of the many academics here and abroad who carry the Ira Rennert name throughout their careers. Nothing he does – tax fraud, stealing pensions, destroying his neighbors’ lives this way and that – seems to shame any of them.

UD has been sitting tight, awaiting the latest Rennert … distastefulness … but it looks as though one of her favorite pursuits may be over. The dude’s been out of the news for awhile, and has recently turned 89, and his current thoughts must certainly revolve around how to fuck the world over postmortem. Maledizione!!

Ira Rennert has aired his world-hatred with a scope and depth available only to the screechingly rich; how to keep screeching that hatred from the quiet of the tomb?

The directives in his will are clear to anyone who, like UD, has made a fetish of the man: Above his vast sepulchre on the grounds of his house, his Sikorsky helicopter must circle eternally in a memorial riot of noise that will deafen and defeat all of the Sagaponack neighbors who have been praying for his death. When the Sikorsky runs out of gas, his other copter will replace it until its fuel tank refills.

The question is not Why is a violent woman running around the big city being violent? That’s not newsworthy. The question needs to be put to Hunter College: Why is one of these on your faculty?

Part of the answer lies in ye olde erotic attraction to radically chic violence that Leonard Bernstein made famous in that same city in the ‘seventies. Shellyne Rodriguez’s art, she tells an interviewer, “highlight[s] the audaciousness of the Biker Boys who take the streets undeterred by NYPD’s futile crackdown.” Makes elements of brainy artsy NY go pitapat.

This sort of thing also exists on some sort of urban mischief continuum with the non-revolutionary, white collar crime (undeterred by the SEC’s futile crackdown) that has always found representation on the boards of trustees of the sorts of schools that think Shellyne Rodriguez is cool. Recall the many high-level lawless money men/university trustees we’ve featured over decades on this blog, starting with Yeshiva University’s dynamic duo, Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin. At the very top of this mafia today are of course Trump/Giuliani (who hold far grander positions than mere trustee) and a whole world of superrich rapacious give-a-shit NY bad boys… UD‘s just saying that when a significant high-profile portion of the local culture is composed of high-risk-loving financial criminals (see Steven Cohen, Brown University etc. etc.) quite a few of them holding powerful positions on university boards of trustees, we shouldn’t be too surprised that this sort of world has room for other sorts of sociopaths. The school that hired Rodriguez features convicted insider trader and trustee Leon Cooperman.

These white/nonwhite criminal twains, trustee and professor, meet with a mutual thrill, a tacit sense of recognition, at a campus cocktail party, say, and if Rodriguez hadn’t attacked a man with a machete the other day, Cooperman would probably eventually have signed off on the tenure of Hunter’s own Jessica Krug. (‘Perhaps one of the most disgusting things [Krug] publicly did was to attempt to justify the brutal murder of 15-year-old Lesandro Guzman-Feliz, who died in a machete attack at the hands of gang members in a case of mistaken identity, by claiming that had he lived he would have ended up being a cop.‘) High-flying scofflaw cultures tend to have no trouble with nasty pieces of work like Rodriguez. Self-aggrandizing nihilist subversive meets self-aggrandizing nihilist subversive.

Yes, yes, post-machete, post-other forms of non white collar violence, Hunter has dropped Rodriguez like a hot potato.

Hunter happily goes on loving itself some bad boy Leon Cooperman, but then he’s not a poor artist. He’s a rich insider trader. He gets to keep his trusteeship.

So the question of how Hunter College found itself holding on to Rodriguez in the first place has two answers: Ever-popular radical violence, and the allied and fully mainstreamed “audaciousness” of NY white collar criminality.

Here’s some wisdom from a very young juror:

James said that the prosecution’s argument that there was a “perfect storm” gathering, and Murdaugh was on cusp of a devastating financial reckoning was a good theme – but wasn’t a persuasive motive.

“I don’t think I’d ever be able to answer why somebody would do something like that,” he said. “But I know that there are people in the world that don’t make sense, and they do things without making it make sense. So I don’t know that there is an answer other than that it happened and that it shouldn’t have.”

Yup. Here’s UD‘s take, FWIW:

Since that morning, when his firm’s financial officer confronted Murdaugh about his extensive theft from the business and its clients, he had been in a deepening, increasingly unmanageable, panic. Thoughts of his family’s ruination, and the ruin, at his hands, of the proud Murdaugh legacy, gripped him more and more tightly.

I don’t think that when he summoned his family to the rural property (Buster was too far away to summon) he did so with any clear motive of killing them; I think he was simply at wit’s end and wanted their help in some way. Or maybe he wanted to confess to them, the way Bernie Madoff gathered his sons to his office and confessed, as the FBI circled, his Ponzi scheme. I don’t think Murdaugh knew what to do; I think he was melting down, and he, in an unspecified atavistic way, wanted his family around him.

Reveling in the beautiful normality of hanging around with Maggie and Paul, with the dogs and the birds, Murdaugh was suddenly overcome with the pointlessness of it all, the loss of it all, the oncoming nothingness of his shattered existence. This was not excruciating self-punishment, or self-hatred; if it were, of course, he would have grabbed one of the hundreds of available guns and killed himself. It was a bleak nihilistic vision of a demonic world all of whose denizens, including his own wife and son, were committed to destroying him. His wife and son, after all, had been getting into his pills, and they were demanding a family conference in which they clearly intended to give him a hard time about the oxy. His drunk out of control son, who’d already racked up booze-related legal problems – hell, who’d already killed someone – could only benefit from having his existence ended. His wife was a nervous wreck about the tens of millions of dollars the bulldog lawyer the dead girl’s parents had hired was promising to get out of the Murdaughs; and she’d already been driven out of the neighborhood of their primary residence because of the horrible publicity about the lethal boat wreck. All that, plus his unmasking, that morning, as a career larcenist…!

Everyone here, he thought, in his nihilistic panic, would be better off dead.

So in the darkness, in the night, facing trusting heedless loved ones, he grabbed his weapons and began blasting away at Paul and Maggie. Make them go away. Make it all go away.

When it came to it, he couldn’t complete the nihilistic horror. He couldn’t turn the weapons on himself. He knew the rest of his life would be litigation and imprisonment but he simply couldn’t end his life. Narcissism, cowardice, whatever. Couldn’t do it.

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But. When all is said and done, remember that great scene in Black Widow, when Debra Winger (as an FBI agent) says to her motive-sniffing boss: “Don’t you understand? No one knows why anyone does anything.”

Unlike deep south football factories, which routinely keep their sports hero bio pages up even when the hero is, for instance, a mass murderer, fancy schmancy schools like Yale erase the bio pages of criminals, frauds, plagiarists, and other embarrassments toot sweet.

And yet in the case of this woman, handcuffed in a New York courtroom because she appears to have stolen 3.5 million from her last employer, NYU, Yale remains a fan.

(By the way: On greed, recall Christopher Hitchens on Ayn Rand: “I don’t think there’s any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings.  I don’t know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.”)

You never see Harvard drop the ball like this. That’s the difference between a school with a 55 billion dollar endowment, and one trying to manage on 41.4 billion.

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On a trickier, far more disgusting matter, the University of Colorado has found the right solution. They were unlucky enough to be housing John Eastman as a visiting scholar when he was actively trying to destroy American democracy. They kicked his ass out, and solved the bio page problem by marking the historical fact that he was there (it’s wrong to be Orwellian about it and pretend – à la Yeshiva University/Bernard Madoff – he wasn’t), while removing everything about him except the undeniable factual point of his having, yes, admittedly, been in residence.

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Huzzah! They finally got around to 404ing her.

[His current legal disasters] reveal a corruption of character, triggered by a succession of moral compromises over the years undertaken to maintain the power and money that he’d grown accustomed to after Sept. 11... His political power has evaporated, and his riches have been almost exhausted — he’s been selling personalized video greetings for $325, and he dressed as a feathered jack-in-the-box for the Fox show “The Masked Singer” this spring.

I dunno. I mean, yes, for Giuliani the hoariest cautionary tale ever (Radix malorum est cupiditas) pertains; but UD has long felt that for Giuliani, Trump, Madoff, and other famous New York maniacs, some city-specific mental illness is also at play, as if the ultimate urban fever that is NYC’s speed, greed, hallucinatory arrogance, Kafkaesque removal from common grounded life — propels these people so far from anything real that they actually become clinically nuts. I think that in his novel Cosmopolis DeLillo was trying to get at this… Just as, from his title on, Tom Wolfe tried the same thing years earlier in Bonfire of the Vanities... Something about the ultimate urban cauldron that sets a soul on fire…

The hyper-pious ex-PM (‘Najib recently said Islam’s holy book, the Koran, would be the guide for all government policies and actions.’) allows modesty edicts to repress Malaysian women, while he himself pleases Allah by stealing seven hundred million dollars directly from the Malaysian people.

Theologically, it is a conundrum; Allah smiles equally upon downtrodden black-cloaked women AND the world’s largest kleptocracy case. He smiles at sick Malaysian children dying from lack of treatment because, of the six billion in the fund meant to help them and their country, four billion was stolen.

Everything would have been peachy; America’s sweetheart, Goldman Sachs, would have pocketed its suspiciously massive fees from 1MDB, all the other crooks who stole hundreds of millions for themselves would have been fine…

But people began to notice the absence of four plus billion dollars from the world. Things began to sour, see, onaccounta

‘Because the money was stolen, it wasn’t invested; without investment returns, the fund couldn’t pay back the bonds.’

Shades of pious Bernie Madoff (in his case his piety was orthodox Judaism — he acted as the treasurer – not making this up – of Yeshiva University)! Pious Najib and his legion of co-conspirators overlooked the fact that if anything goes wrong with schemes like this, you’re up shit’s creek cuz the money’s already up the nose of your cocaine-snorting, super-yacht-private-jet-super-thin-nyc-penthouse-owning Islamically pious investment group.

Najib now enjoys twelve years of uninterrupted prayer in a Malaysian prison.

Watch this video, titled Behind Goldman Sachs’ Alleged Involvement in the 1MBD Scandal. It explains the gist of the thing. I know you’re distracted by The Trump 300 (700?), but trust me 1MDB is more important; America will survive a once-in-a-lifetime madman having attained the presidency; the sad sick world cannot be defended from lethal international criminals (including, again, our own adorable Goldman Sachs) unless we all make an effort to understand how they are killing us.

This blog has long argued the importance of rescinding honorary degrees from, er, some of their recipients. Examples:

Bernard Madoff

Theodore McCarrick

Bill Cosby

Lance Armstrong

Sepp Blatter

Donald Trump

Sheldon Silver

James Levine

Almost all of these sex and/or money scumsters eventually lost the honor aura conferred upon them by America’s debauched universities (debauched because, in almost every case, a touch of due diligence would have uncovered enough rumors to stay their hand, but these schools apparently didn’t care).

But what about, say, a law degree? An actual degree you work for and pay for? Is there behavior dishonorable enough to justify rescinding a BA or a JD?

What about an MD? UD has argued that Jumana Nagarwala, who put her Hopkins MD to use allegedly slicing off the genitals of little girls all over the midwest, should have that degree rescinded under… call it the Mengele Rule. It’s pretty easy to argue that people who got BAs under false pretenses (as in the Varsity Blues case, where rejects took the place of qualified applicants because their parents faked their applications and paid various well-connected criminals enormous sums of money to help them) should have their degrees revoked. The principle here is that a legitimate university has a reputation to defend, and when it harbors filthy crooks it should formally, publicly, expel them.

And a lawyer? A student who attends your school in order to learn the laws of our land in order to use those same laws to destroy it? This is much like the 9/11 pilots who attended flight school here solely in order to crash their planes into buildings. It would seem to be rather at odds with the purpose of a legal education, a serious education in the rule of law in our democracy. If I were Chicago I’d be pretty fucking embarrassed to be the school that taught John Eastman the law solely in order for him to twist it to destroy the country. I mean, is my face red!

It’s not too early for UD‘s beloved U of C to start considering a process by which they can cleanly disassociate themselves from this piece of shit.