As someone who has covered the AMAZING cavalcade of convicted crooks who have learned their trade at Wharton, UD will say what she has lo these many years said about Wharton:
As an insider trader factory — as, more broadly, the nation’s most illustrious breeder of malfeasors this side of Ma Barker — Trump’s alma mater certainly should have taught wee Donald and his classmates what a mugshot is.
I told you it’s hard to keep up.
Even if, like UD, you really try.
Asked for a reaction, one Wharton insider said: “We clearly need to search our soul. But we haven’t got a soul.”
But surely the school knows that Wharton has produced REAMS of indicted businesspeople. You can get a start on the honor roll on this blog. UD decided a few years ago to keep track of jailed Wharton grads (start with the Dec. 28, 2017 post), but she couldn’t keep up.
Er, not quite. Readers will recall UD‘s extensive, and really kind of fun, coverage of the inimitable Philip Esformes (scroll down) and his BFF, U Penn HEAD basketball coach (datz right – not coaching staff, not booster, HEAD COACH) Jerome Allen, a man who used a position of high responsibility, visibility, and salary to pretend that Esformes’ pisher was actually a Penn basketball recruit in order to get the unskilled unbright cheater into Wharton. This was a version of the Varsity Blues deal, with a $250,000 bribe going directly into the hands of the man U Penn judged ethically appropriate to run its entire basketball operation.
Lots of sports writers are okay with Allen getting thrown out of the college game (Who cares. He now has a job in professional basketball, where taking only a quarter million bribe is a mark of serious inadequacy.), but they’re all huffy cuz Penn got some penalties too. After all, they just housed a moral degenerate… and the whole bribery thing didn’t fuck up their winning average or anything, so why, God, why?
We’ve chronicled for years on this blog the remarkable number of truly out-sized financial criminals who got their training at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Here’s another one – a Muslim who used some of his money to “to undo negative misperceptions of [Muslims] in [the] media.”
… is over! (Trumper Warning)
The halcyon days of graduates like Michael Milken, David S. Brown, Robert Salsbury, Ira B. Sokolow, Bruce Lee Newberg, Raj Rajaratnam, Courtney Dupree, Craig Toll, Anil Kumar, Thomas Hardin, Rajiv Goel, Steven Cohen, and many more have given way to the dark days of Wharton grad Donald Trump.
Silent until now about their honor roll of distinguished alumni (known to all as “The Wharton Mafia”), Wharton folk have lately decided to go public.
A letter disinvesting themselves from Trump has gone out from Wharton grads past and present. They begin with a questionable assertion:
At the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, students are taught to represent the highest levels of respect and integrity. We are taught to embrace humility and diversity.
There must be a serious teacher quality problem at Wharton, because it’s really not getting through.
The letter goes on to express “deep disappointment” in Trump’s hateful arrogant ways, so at odds with sweet humble Wharton… It’s important, its co-authors say, to “speak out against” Trump… But where’s the letter speaking out about decades and decades of The Wharton Mafia?
Say what you will about Trump, no one’s claiming he’s going to jail anytime soon, which is where much of The Wharton Mafia went.
It all started back in the ‘eighties, with Donald Trump’s alma mater producing so many financial criminals that newspapers started keeping track of the ever-growing Wharton “Hall of Shame.” (Type WHARTON in my search engine for all the gory details.) The tradition persists today, with Wharton featuring prominently in articles with titles like Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals? and The Wharton Mafia. It’s positively embarrassing.
The Wharton School of Business has deified Donald Trump, boasting in its alumni magazine of his greatness and influence. It can’t get enough of him. It’s pleased as punch and bursting with pride to have spawned him…. or at least it was until around 2007. In a recent article about him in the U Penn paper, people are beginning to sound less enthusiastic.
A Wharton spokesperson said that the leadership of the alumni office and magazine have turned over since the publication of the article, and declined to comment further on Trump.
Hm. A bit snippy there… But, you know, it’s one thing to go the silence route (Trump? Trump who…?); it’s another thing – especially given Wharton’s cultural role as National Fraternal Order of America’s Great Insider Traders – actually to come out and repudiate “the worst human being who has ever won a Republican primary.”
UD doesn’t mean revoke his degree or anything. She means that given Wharton’s already filthy reputation, and given Trump’s incessant dropping of the Wharton name alongside his name, the school might consider issuing a statement distancing itself from its most famous graduate.
Missed a chance to mention the most impressive thing of all: He founded a university.
If UD had never started this blog, she would never have come to know the Wharton School, one of America’s most curious institutions. Though Donald Trump is by far its highest-profile graduate, Wharton (as you know if you read this blog) is the dominant source for this country’s insider traders in particular and fraudsters in general.
B-School boys do dither on a regular basis about the amorality many of their schools champion – I mean, as regular as each breaking story about another Raj Rajaratnam… Some of these guys even notice that a major function of schools like Wharton is to bring conspirators together. Guys who as lads were maladjusted malefactors find at Wharton (type WHARTON in my search engine for all of my posts about the school) a warm inviting community of people just like themselves with whom to mastermind billion-dollar larcenies. When the Justice Department starts saying unkind things about one or another Wharton grad, their school buddies come out with eloquent character references.
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Still, how unfair to say Donald Trump isn’t reflective! He founded a university.
… went the headline way back in 1988, an earlier insider trading season. Having covered oodles of more recently imprisoned Wharton grads on this blog, my question is: Is the Wharton school criminogenic? Does it take nice boys (they’re all boys) and make them naughty? Or is it (as UD suspects) simply notorious for being the go-to place to learn how to be a financial crook and to make, er, connections with other people along these lines? Just put WHARTON in my search engine for a sample of these amazing high-flyers! I’m thinking that if you’re not planning to defraud at the very least a thousand investors, you’re not going to bother applying to Wharton. I’m thinking that if you’re not planning to steal in the tens of millions you’re not going to bother with the application fee.
So – and I know – who’s counting? – but so the latest Wharton guy is Courtney Dupree, also a product of scandal-city University of North Carolina. Once a mover/shaker in his “super-chic loft on Broad Street in Manhattan’s financial district,” he’s now off to seven years in prison for an $18 million bank fraud. And The Legend of Wharton lives on.
The Wharton School of Business. UD has lost count of how many graduates, just this year, have been indicted for incredibly high-level fraud.
[Craig] Toll … [is] charged with defrauding … investors out of $40 million, and scamming the federal government out of … $10 million [he was] given to help finance construction of a Haitian factory to build homes for hurricane victims.
Toll, 64, is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
… [He is charged with] 23 counts of fraud and money laundering
Do you suppose anyone at Wharton notices how many of their graduates are criminals, or are under indictment? Or are, like Brown University’s highest-profile trustee, getting buzzed by the SEC an awful lot?
Hell, maybe Wharton’s proud of it. You have to figure there are tons more graduates out there successfully defrauding people.
When you’re a student reporter at the University of Pennsylvania, and when the subject is the Wharton School’s scads of insider traders, you have to do a lot of digging. There’s a history here, and it’s pretty impressive.
Another reporter goes farther back:
[L]ast week’s conviction of a prominent Wharton MBA alum [was] the biggest insider trading case since the 1989 conviction of junk bond king Michael Miliken, another Wharton grad.
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UD thanks JND.
… aimed at students protesting the campus visit of Mr One Percent, Eric Cantor — a banner reading
GET IN OUR BRACKET
— so students at Georgetown University are marketing their investment fund to fellow students with the tagline
BECOME THE ONE PERCENT.
Much huffing and puffing about it here. But really – it’s a clever slogan, and it has helped attract a lot of investors.
… which is producing the most criminalized graduating classes of MBAs in the country by far.
Unless the other schools’ grads are simply better at not getting caught.
If you’re going to take in that many fraudsters, you should at least teach them how to evade capture.