FBI Shifts from Terror to Madoff, Subprime Probes ('Greatest Threat is to Financial System')

[Hissyspit]

Source: Bloomberg

FBI Uses Triage to Shift From Terror to Madoff, Subprime Probes

By Patricia Hurtado
Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The FBI has engaged in “triage,” taking agents off terror and other crimes to respond to a cascade of financial frauds such as the alleged Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, the head of the bureau’s New York criminal division said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation was forced to reallocate its manpower in New York to deal with recent frauds involving subprime mortgages, auction-rate securities and Madoff, who prosecutors said confessed this month to bilking investors out of $50 billion, FBI official David Cardona said in an interview. “We have to work those cases which we think pose the greatest threat,” he said. “In this case, it’s a threat to the financial system and Wall Street.”

Special Agent Rachel Rojas, who once worked on tracing terrorist financing and al-Qaeda, now oversees 15 agents investigating mortgage fraud, said Cardona, a career agent with 23 years at the bureau. He declined to say how many other agents he has reassigned from anti-terror work to financial crimes.

Rojas heads one of two such mortgage-fraud squads that work with federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and Manhattan and other federal agencies, Cardona said. The U.S. Justice Department has created more than 40 mortgage-fraud task forces around the country this year. Some of the FBI’s anti-terror experience has come in handy in investigating financial crime, Cardona said. Agents who were looking at bank-provided “suspicious activity reports” or SARS to track financing of terrorism are now doing so to spot mortgage or other financial fraud, he said.

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170&refer=home&sid=aAZwa1ACdRbc

[UpInArms]

1. cows out? check - close barn door now

:eyes:

[HeraldSquare212]

2. "The threat, it's...it's coming from inside the country!"

[hatrack]

3. But . . . but . . . I thought "they" hated us for our freedoms!

:eyes:

[Old and In the Way]

4. Turns out the real terrorists were corrupt financiers and their Republican counterparts.

The "freemarket, less regulation, no oversight" philosophy that dominated our political-economic discourse the past 20 years will have done far more damage than any bunch of terrorists could have done. They were harder to spot, though. TRey weren't dark skinned and the wore business suits with little American flag lapels. We lived through the warm-up act in the 80's with the Savings and Loan cleanout...why should we be surprised that the same crooks who weren't prosecuted for those crimes were able to take down our top line institutions this time?

I just want to know one thing....how much money has Dick Cheney, the Bush family, and Phil Gramm made the past 8 years.

[UpInArms]

6. Gramms and Enron: A Mutual Aid Society - Rules backed by senator, wife helped company

http://web.archive.org/web/20020215171427/http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usgram272582851feb10.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-print

February 10, 2002

Washington - Former Commodity Futures Trading Commission chief Wendy Gramm - a subject of congressional investigators because she sits on Enron's board of the directors - had a free-market philosophy she likened to tending a garden. Weeds, she said at a January 1993 CFTC board meeting, should be rooted out, but "we must be careful that we don't pull up anything green, just because it might turn into a weed."

That philosophy indicated Gramm was reluctant to cut off new kinds of financial instruments before they had a chance to grow without being regulated. It was that mind-set in January 1993 that led Gramm to conclude that sophisticated financial instruments used to hedge against risk, called "swaps," should be free from regulation by her board. Energy "swaps" were among the financial instruments traded by Enron, out of sight of government regulators, and which may have been used to hide the company's true financial condition. The CFTC voted unanimously to exempt swaps, though at least one regulator had misgivings. Six weeks later, Gramm left the CFTC for a seat on Enron's board.

Gramm's husband, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), too, was a friend to free markets and had a hand in legislation that also exempted the sophisticated financial instruments. "It should come as no surprise to anyone that I believe in competition," he said last week.

Phil and Wendy Gramm have links to Enron and were involved in legislation and rules that benefited Enron. The relationships were sometimes murky and complex.

The company donated almost $100,000 to Sen. Gramm over the past decade, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and Wendy Gramm, once she left the CFTC in 1993, has been paid at least $900,000 in fees, stock options and dividends by the company over the past eight years, according to the consumer group Public Citizen.

But the Gramms said they lost $686,000 of that amount in the Enron collapse, mostly in the form of Wendy Gramm's deferred compensation. Phil Gramm got $97,000 in campaign contributions from Enron employees over the past decade, both for his Senate re-election campaigns and his short-lived run for the presidency in 1996. When he announced in September 2001 that he would not be running for a fourth term in the Senate, he said he would return all donations directed at that campaign.

Sen. Gramm says he and his wife never discussed her job at Enron, but said that in 1999, in anticipation of a Senate debate on electricity deregulation, the two decided that Wendy Gramm's stock options in Enron, which were part of her compensation package, should be put into "deferred compensation," a kind of retirement plan. Declines in the deferred compensation led to the Gramms' financial losses, he said.

In 2000, when Sen. Gramm, along with Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), drafted a bill to deregulate the electricity industry, it also included an exemption from oversight for swaps. But that bill died in the Senate. While the CFTC rules would have dealt with some of the sophisticated financial instruments, a new law would have taken precedence and would have included other financial instruments as well.

Later that year, some of the items in that bill were included in legislation to renew the charter of the CFTC, which also included an exemption from regulation for swaps and other sophisticated trading instruments. Just as it was about to be approved late in 2000, Gramm raised concerns about items in the bill unrelated to the swaps Enron was interested in. He was concerned about banking issues and put a hold on the bill. But he was persuaded in the end to support it after talks with the Treasury Department, not Enron, Gramm's spokesman said.

Treasury officials and others argued that if the financial instruments were too closely regulated, the market would simply move overseas.

...more...

[NeoConsSuck]

5. Look! Over There!

Isn't that Govenor Spitzer with a hooker!?!?

Triage, my ass.