If We Were a Nation of Laws, Donald Trump Would Have Been in Prison Years Ago
Remember Harry Markopolos?
Come on! You remember him.
He was the guy who helped authorities avert a cataclysmic financial crime when he warned the world of a narcissistic grifter who created a Ponzi scheme that ensnared billions of dollars from hedge fund managers, and newspaper publishers, and municipalities, and Jewish charities, and Steven Spielberg, and regular individuals who invested their life savings.
Harry Markopolos saw through the scheme, and saved all of those people whose lives and businesses would otherwise have been ruined, or irreparably harmed.
Oh… wait… I’m sorry. I have this backwards.
Remember Bernie Madoff? Of course you do. Bernie Madoff was famous, and then infamous. He created a Ponzi scheme that ensnared billions of dollars from hedge fund managers, and newspaper publishers, and municipalities, and Jewish charities, and Steven Spielberg, and regular individuals who invested their life savings.
People committed suicide because of Bernie Madoff. Including his own son, who hanged himself on the 2-year anniversary of his father’s arrest.
Harry Markopolos is a guy who became suspicious of Madoff’s miraculous, too-good-to-be-true investment returns, and crunched the numbers. What he found was fraud. Unbelievable fraud. So unbelievable that no one would believe him.
"The math was so compelling," Markopolos told the Guardian’s Andrew Clark in 2010. "If there's only one billion [dollars] of options in existence and he's many times that size, unless you could change the laws of mathematics, I knew I had to be right.”
After he found the fraud, Markopolos went to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Multiple times. Starting in 2001, seven years before Madoff’s Ponzi scheme collapsed. Markopolos took his numbers to journalists. He went to politicians.
They ignored him.
After all, Harry Markopolos was a nerdy math guy. Kinda quirky and intense. He didn’t walk into a room wearing cashmere suits, sweeping people off their feet. He didn’t charm people. He didn’t make them feel safe.
Bernie Madoff was charming and well-dressed and assured. So people were assured by him.
When Madoff’s schemes came to their inevitable end, some journalists got interested in Markopolos. But some still couldn’t give him his due.
“The Wall Street Journal, which did nothing with Markopolos's dossier on Madoff for two years,” wrote Clark in 2010, “recently patronised him as ‘a little bit nuts’.”
Even now, when you Google “Bernie Madoff,” he is identified not as a criminal but as an “American Financier.”
Markopolos is forgiving of the people who ignored him. At least he was 13 years ago. He sloughed off the closed doors he ran into as incompetence. The journalists and politicians, even SEC staffers (who are mostly attorneys) are not forensic accountants.
He also said something else in the Guardian piece that stuck with me. People didn’t believe him, because Madoff’s fraud “was just too big.”
Passive Aggressive America
What got me thinking about Harry Markopolos - and yes, I had forgotten his name, but Googling “the guy who nobody believed about Bernie Madoff” is unsettlingly effective - was this story I had read, also in the Guardian, a few months ago. It’s about two violent crime survivors who are doing a podcast about what happens to survivors after the perpetrator is imprisoned.
One of the main points the two people - Terra Newell and Collier Landry - make is that they are shunned. Because they survived. Because they blew the whistle, told the truth about their violent parent or husband. Truth that most people would rather ignore.
“The mindset in the suburban communities where [Newell] grew up was too often to excuse or apologize for abuse and to pressure victims to stay silent,” writes Andrew Gumbel. (Is everyone who writes for the Guardian named Andrew?)
You’d Notice Him
Then there’s Jeffrey Epstein, whose sex trafficking of underage girls came to the attention of the Palm Beach Police around 2005, and had been estimated to have been going on since 2002. In this case, there was no one whistleblower to be disbelieved. Michael Reiter, the Palm Beach police chief at the time, told the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown in 2018, “This was not a ‘he said, she said’ situation. This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’ — and the ‘shes’ all basically told the same story.’’
Brown, who brought Epstein’s crimes back into the spotlight in her incredible series “Perversion of Justice,” eventually found the number to be around 80 girls recruited to a Ponzi scheme-like sex ring when they were around 14 years old.
But this is different from Markopolos, right? In this case, the cops were onto Epstein, had seen girls coming and going to his home, saw girls’ names on flight manifests, had girls and their families report him, which led them to more victims. This was a case in which the perpetrator was going to be punished.
Except he wasn’t. Not at first.
Brown writes in “Perversion of Justice” that the Palm Beach Police, fearing that the city’s State Attorney’s Office was going to undermine their case, quickly referred it to the FBI in 2006.
The FBI also believed they had an unsinkable case. But then Alex Acosta, who was the U.S. Attorney for the Miami-Dade area, cut a deal with Epstein’s attorneys. He wrote a non-prosecution agreement that put Epstein on a work release prison arrangement for 13 months.
The case was only reopened because of Brown’s series - 12 years later - in which she talked to numbers of women whose voices were silenced, and who weren’t even informed of the non-prosecution agreement.
By that time, Alex Acosta was Labor Secretary under Donald Trump. One of his responsibilities? Stopping sex trafficking.
Laws? What Laws?
Then there’s Trump, himself.
I have spent too many days this week listening to the former-prosecutors-turned-pundits on MSNBC opine about the latest legal charges to befall Trump, including conspiring to stop the peaceful transfer of power, and using the violence of January 6 as part of his argument to Congresspeople to stop their proceedings.
That last part fascinates me. It’s kinda like a mob boss who puts the head of your prized horse in your bed and then tells you to do what you think is right.
But I don’t want to address this current indictment. I want to address the indictments that never were. But should have been.
The first big case the government had against Trump was in 1973, when the Justice Department sued him and his father for violations of the Fair Housing Act. Sued him. Didn’t arrest him. Didn’t criminally charge him. Because the Fair Housing Act only allows criminal charges when force is used or threatened, when the person charged perjures themselves, or when they destroy records. And like all smooth criminals, if any of that was done, the Trumps made sure they were far away from it.
Three years after Trump settled the suit for an amount of no more than $100,000 (because that is what the law says), he was sued again by the Justice Department for violating the terms of the first settlement.
Again, he was not arrested. He was not criminally charged. Even when it was shown that he ignored the agreement he had made not to discriminate anymore.
Here’s the section on criminal penalties for the Fair Housing Act:
After those Fair Housing Act violations, Trump was sued by the Justice Department and the SEC for issues in buying stock and publishing “misleading earnings.”
He was sued for improper lobbying, and for strong-arming people to vacate a building he wanted to demolish.
In 2013, Trump was sued by New York State for defrauding thousands of people out of $40 million with Trump University. He didn’t settle that lawsuit until he had won the presidency.
He was SUED. For defrauding people for tens of millions of dollars. During a time when less “esteemed” residents of New York were jailed for breaking windows or carrying backpacks.
Wikipedia actually has a pretty handy list of all the legal troubles Trump has been part of. They are all suits. There are no criminal proceedings.
Is It Too Late?
All of the cable pundits this week have frequently used a line that has made me laugh out loud: “We are a nation of laws.”
No, we’re not. We’re a nation of lawmaking and prosecutorial discretion. The more you look like the people making and prosecuting the laws, the more discretion you get.
There is no reason for the Fair Housing Act to not have strict criminal penalties.
There was no reason for people to have ignored Harry Markopolos.
There is no reason for Jeffrey Epstein to have gotten away with child sex trafficking and assault until one journalist - who had to fight her editors in order to cover the story - talked to his victims. That likely might not have happened if #MeToo hadn’t brought sex crimes into our consciousness in the fall of 2017, writes Andrew Anthony. (And yes, every Guardian writer does seem to be named Andrew.)
The victims or whistleblowers for these crimes - underage girls, poor Black people, awkward accountants - weren’t victims or whistleblowers that we cared about. As the story about victims Newell and Landry illustrates, we tend to be wary of people who don’t ignore wrongdoing.
I am heartened to see that, finally, there are federal and state prosecutors, and members of Congress, who are standing up for the rule of law. But it seems a bit extreme to wait till our democracy is at stake to get to this point. Trump should have been put in jail years, if not decades, ago. Epstein should have been convicted and had the key thrown away in 2006. The Wall Street Journal and the SEC should have believed Markopolos.
None of that happened. And our tolerance, our lack of outrage… that’s what got us where we are today.
The question I have is once Trump is convicted, can we finally turn around and start living up to that seemingly Utopian goal of living in a “nation of laws,” or will we just go back to playing footsie with people who look like, or can possibly implicate, our lawmakers?
This Week’s Contest Winners!
Every week at least one subhead is a lyric from or reference to a song from musical theatre. Guess the song and the show and I will feature a video congratulations in next week’s piece.
We have two people who correctly guessed the musical theatre subhead from last week.
Guess this week’s musical theatre subhead - song and show - and I will name you next week. Give your answers in the comments!