{"id":185633,"date":"2014-09-22T20:42:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-23T01:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/09\/22\/not-enough-bullets-56\/"},"modified":"2014-09-22T20:42:00","modified_gmt":"2014-09-23T01:42:00","slug":"not-enough-bullets-56","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/09\/22\/not-enough-bullets-56\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Enough Bullets\u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>
Disgraceful<\/i><\/div>\n

Various regulators tell us that there is no t need to send the banksters to jail, because the fines are deterrence enough.<\/p>\n

Guess what? Those same regulators end up never collecting those fines<\/a>:<\/p>\n

On a plane earlier this week, I watched The Wolf of Wall Street<\/i>. The film\u2019s outsized antics\u2014public masturbation, the tossing of little people, lots and lots of Quaaludes\u2014seemed too big for a seatback screen, or, for that matter, reality. As despicable as some of Jordan Belfort\u2019s behavior was, I was able to occasionally laugh at Leonardo DiCaprio’s version of him knowing that, by now, more than 10 years after his real-life sentencing, Belfort has been sufficiently punished. <\/span>

<\/span>But in fact, that\u2019s hardly the case: After pleading guilty to fraud and money laundering, Belfort was ordered in 2003 to pay out about $110 million to those he wronged. Since then, he\u2019s only paid $11.8 million. He was also sentenced to four years in federal prison, but he only ended up serving just shy of two years<\/a>.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Belfort\u2019s relatively consequence-free story is only one of the more prominent ones in a parade of aggravating numbers reported on earlier this week by The Wall Street Journal<\/i><\/a>. There\u2019s still $97 billion out there in penalties that the Justice Department has failed to recover, and between September 2012 and September 2013, the department collected only 22 percent of penalties doled out. One particularly demoralizing figure was that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission had collected about a tenth of a percent of the $3.7 billion owed to wronged investors.<\/span><\/p>\n

So how do convicted felons go about avoiding their payments? Take the case of Paul Bilzerian, who owed the Securities and Exchange Commission $62 million and paid only $3.7 million over the course of 25 years. (The Journal<\/i> reported a few days ago<\/a> that the SEC was officially giving up on getting any more money from him, after having spent $8.6 million to get the meager amount that they did obtain.) <\/p>\n

Bilzerian has systematically thwarted federal prosecutors by building a web of trusts, partnerships, and corporations established in sketchy tropical locales. He has passed on cash and assets to his sons. He delayed prosecutors for years with a bankruptcy filing. And he has transferred ownership of his 28,000 square-foot home to trusts that were owned by, at various times, his in-laws and his neighbor\u2019s mom. \u201cDo you think I\u2019d be stupid enough to have a bank account?\u201d Bilzerian told a Journal<\/i> reporter.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, someone gets caught selling a dime bag, they take everything through asset forfeiture, but this guy is living in the lap of luxury.<\/p>\n

You know, these guys are economic terrorists.<\/p>\n

Why can’t we drone them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Disgraceful Various regulators tell us that there is no t need to send the banksters to jail, because the fines are deterrence enough. Guess what? Those same regulators end up never collecting those fines: On a plane earlier this week, I watched The Wolf of Wall Street. The film\u2019s outsized antics\u2014public masturbation, the tossing of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1004,972,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-finance","category-justice","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185633"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185633\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}